Mindaugas Kavaliauskas

There are people who watch football. There are others who go fishing. These people go out to watch airplanes...

This is an “accidental” body of work, which started to grow up since 2005 and continue until now. During extensive travels of Mindaugas Kavaliauskas – photographer, curator and expert – frequently flying to and from exhibitions, festivals, portfolio reviews in Europe and beyond its borders, discovered that a camera could be used to depict life, where for most of us time starts to stand still…

“Portrait of Kražiai” is the signature work of Mindaugas Kavaliauskas. The main part of the project has been created between 2001 and 2003. Kražiai, a small town in the north-west of Lithuania, is inseparably linked with Lithuanian identity.

A mystery of a hundred-year-old photograph that traveled from Chicago suburbs to Kražiai, Lithuania.

This is the second-largest long-term photographic project by Mindaugas Kavaliauskas, consisting of pictures taken all across Lithuania from 2001 until present. It used to be said decades ago that Lithuania was an agricultural country. Today Lithuania is often described as country of beer & basketball. But there is almost no talk about a very special phenomenon, the recent cult of CAR, that started to emerge since 1990.

Initially, it was a part of “AUTO -Portraits & -Landscapes”. When Mindaugas Kavaliauskas came back to Lithuania after his studies abroad in 2001, he was fascinated by the vast areas of second-hand car markets in major Lithuanian cities: Vilnius, Kaunas, Marijampolė, Utena. He went to photograph these car-scapes using 4×5 view camera and a panoramic camera. The scale of the Euro-Asian car business was documented.

This work is a part of a 4-men project about twin cities Kaunas (Lithuania) and Grenoble (France). In 2011, French photographers from Grenoble Thierry Chenu and Thomas Guilmin visited and pictured Kaunas, while two Lithuanian photographers from Kaunas, Gintaras Česonis and Mindaugas Kavaliauskas went on a week-long field task to Grenoble.

The newest project, “Life (un)seen. Near the blind” is about a community of blind and weak-sighted people, whose activities and living place is near a huge building, formerly known as blind’s factory, now hosting social, creative activities, concerts.

A story of a monument told by ever-imperfect photography from 1992 to 2013

“Villa Candy” (2005) is a one-day documentary work about the state of affairs in a the place of collective resort built on the Lithuania in Soviet times.

In 2002, the dawn of the digital era, the quest for „defective“ beauty of the „passed-away“ film photography lead Mindaugas Kavaliauskas to re-browse his archive of negatives in search of most picturesque film ends and to create „B&W film End” series.

Since generations, the Hovden island in Møsvatn lake (Telemark, Norway). Today Harold Hovden with his wife Hilde and 4 daughters Ashild, Tone, Marjit and Anlaug, are the only permanent inhabitants of the island. During the summer time, which means, when the lake is not frozen, the Hovden family runs a taxi boat business, go fishing every day and do basic agriculture.