Rural + Urban Markets - Mindaugas Kavaliauskas

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.

Between 2006 and 2009, the photographer went to see the close-ups of the used car business, mostly photographing the biggest car market, which is in his native city of Kaunas. Portraits of buyers and sellers, still-lives, fragments of cars became a part of his new research.

For convincing the models refusing to be pictured, Mindaugas Kavaliauskas sometimes had a tool in his bag – a book about rural markets by a legendary photographer Aleksandras Macijauskas (b. 1938), one of the most important figures of the Lithuanian School of Photography and the post-war avant-gardes in European photography. The primary intention of these pictures was to produce a record of something that was meant to vanish under the Soviet rule – the private property and “speculation” on it on the market.

In the new millennium, the master’s signature work “Country Markets” helped the car sellers to understand the importance of the documentary work of the younger photographer. In such a way the “NO” in many cases turned into “YES”, and the time spend talking and discussing things would turn into images.

In 2013, the year of 75th anniversary of Aleksandras Macijauskas, Mindaugas Kavaliauskas took a complex look at the heritage images of the “Rural Markets”, dating between 1960s and found responses to them by adding images of 2000s and 2010s with another “very Lithuanian” occupation, used car business, bridging the almost half-a-century differences and similarities of the lifestyle of Lithuanians.

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A limited edition of archival prints (size 40×50, HAHNEMÜHLE Photo Rag 308) are available.
The first public showing of the series of prints – FotoFever fair, Brussels, Oct 4-6, 2013 at Kaunas Photo stand.