Gintautas Skuodas

Gintautas Skuodas, who creates in advertising and artistic photography area, took an interest in photography more than ten years ago. The photographer remembers, that the first camera was CMENA 3 M. Still attending drawing lessons at a painter E. Survila, he took over a technique of drawing objects by the planes, which he successfully applied in the photography too, later on. The artist creates by invoking the canvas technology, therefore his photographs have many allusions with the painting. The photographer turns an objective to cities, mostly – to Kaunas, but some of the architectural objects he has recorded in Vilnius.

The city has become the object of mostly modern photography. “The city – its architecture, a sketch of streets and roofs – geography, history and commonness are boundless to photography. However, it is more piquant object. Maybe, accordingly, over the last twenty years all great Lithuanian cities have attained photographic interpretations, mostly itemized by literary texts. The city, where you live, becomes boringly familiar – here you already know by rote every brick, pole, every sky between houses. Among casual passers-by, you don‘t notice architectural memorials of the towns, the singularity, for which strangers come“. (A. Narušytė, “Lithuanian photography 1990-2010“, Citie’s 91, 92).

In the photographs the author fixates well known objects of Kaunas and Vilnius architecture: Vytautas Church, City Hall, Soboras, Thunder house and the other for all of us familiar places and architectural memorials of Vilnius and Kaunas, objects of cities and their old towns. In the panoramic landscapes of Kaunas Santaka is fixated in different seasons, other color natural background develops still another changing of perspectives, creates contrast. In the photography of G. Skuodas the color performs a big role. From the first sight, his pieces might like to compare to a colored postcard, however, it is only a primary impression, which disperses quickly. Impressionistic play of the colors, subtle color nuances, light and dark, shadow changing give a mystical mystery to the photographs. In the fog, in the mist or in the twilight of the evening drowned, some faded a shape of the building abstracts in the photograph, loses real contours.

Created photographic intrigue of G. Skuodas, unexpected photographic point allure a viewer to still unknown world. The author’s focused or panoramic look to familiar, well known spaces of Kaunas and Vilnius remain especially individual images of the cities, in which important is not only fixation of the historical spaces, but, also, a pictorial stroke, color nuances, leading to, it could look, a symbolism of a bored townscape in the commonness.