Lithuanian Landscape Photography of the 20th Century: Place Towards Space

This article analyses Lithuanian landscape photography that reflects the cultural landscape of the 20th century, revealing not only the natural phenomena of the land, but also the historical development of the country, social memory and national identity. Landscape photographs are abundant with cultural codes implicated in visual structures of landscapes, which are read and distinguished with the help of the palimpsest model. An interdisciplinary methodological approach is applied to the understanding of the functioning of photography in the spatial and local planes and to the purposeful use of the concepts of place and space, combining the phenomenological insights of humanistic geography, the theory of spatial production of the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, and the art historical analysis of visual texts. This interdisciplinary study introduces the cultural layer that is characteristic of the 20th century landscape, provides a sense of historical time shifts, and clarifies the prevailing stylistic movements in photographic landscapes.