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Antanas Sutkus (born 27 June 1939) is a Lithuanian photographer.[1]
Sutkus is a recipient of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas,[2] and the Dr. Erich Salomon Award.[3] He was one of the co-founders and a president of the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers (Lithuanian: Lietuvos fotografijos meno draugija).[4]
Sutkus was born on 27 June 1939 in Kluoniškiai, Kaunas district, Lithuania.
He studied journalism at Vilnius University in the late 1950s; at the time the Lithuanian SSR[4] was part of the Soviet Union. He became disillusioned by the confines of the Soviet-controlled press and began taking photographs, wanting to find a way to make his camera "a weapon for the underground" in portraying resistance to the USSR.[5] Sutkus concentrated on black and white portraits of ordinary people in their everyday life rather than the model citizens and workers promoted by Soviet propaganda.[6][1] He photographed children, who represented a kind of freedom: "Children have a world with its own laws, rules, its own happiness and sadness. To enter it, you need to feel that you are a kid. Adults and children are different stories."[5] A series of mid-1960s portraits of children, often with adults in the shot pointedly faceless and irrelevant, was collected in a 2020 book. He took a photograph that became famous of a communist "Young Pioneer" boy with shaven head and very sad expression which got him called before the central committee and denounced as "photography's Solzhenitsyn" (see illustration of poster above).[5]
He co-founded the Lithuanian Association of Art Photographers in 1969.[1] He is well-known for his life-long survey, People of Lithuania,[1] begun in 1976 to document the changing life and people of the Lithuanian SSR.[4]
Sutkus had an opportunity to spend time with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1965 when they visited Lithuania. One image, taken against the white sand of Nida, is highly regarded as capturing Sartre's ideas.[7]
