Imagine rolling up to a dingy dance club in a remote Lithuanian village in the middle of the night with two 6x7 cameras and asking to take people's pictures. That's exactly what Andrew Miksys did for his series DISKO.
“It's a bit strange to show up at a remote village disco not knowing anybody," says Miksys. "I was an outsider and barely spoke Lithuanian, but in almost every instance the people in the discos were great hosts and looked after me.”
But what began as a fascinating look at a fringe youth culture turned out to be a compelling journey revealing ancient customs, modern conflict, and a good deal of his own family history.
“I see the project as a long meditation on the history of Lithuania,” says Miksys, whose grandparents fled the country at the end of World War II. “The small communities in which I photographed were incredibly diverse before WWII and home to Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians, Russians, and Jews alike.”
Many of the clubs in DISKO occupy buildings built and used by populations ravaged in Lithuania’s violent history—some of the darkest moments of 20th century Europe. One nightclub was a repurposed synagogue in of the town of Eišiškės, a former Jewish shtetl. “The synagogue was where the Nazis imprisoned the Jews from the village before they were murdered,” Miksys says.
After WWII, Nazi genocide and occupation was replaced by communist Soviet rule, which brought its own ideological program and hardships. The Soviet era ended in 1991, and from 1998 until his return to his hometown of Seattle in 2013, Miksys was based in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. He photographed throughout the country’s most recent political shift, from former Soviet republic to a westward-looking European nation.
In Lithuania today, as commerce has shifted to urban centers, rural communities are increasingly marginalized, both economically and socially. Populations are dwindling; the shabby discos fusing Russian pop with American rap might soon to be a thing of the past.
“My photos are also a celebration,” says Miksys. “I wanted to record them before they disappeared.”
The partiers in Miksys's photos were willing participants. Once they understood his project, they'd step off the chaotic dance floor to an antechamber or make-out room to pose for portraits.
Growing up in Seattle, Miksys admits, he didn't know much about his heritage. His grandparents left Lithuania at the end of WWII just before the Soviet Army occupation began—they feared the the possibility of being sent to Siberia or worse, so they loaded up the family (including Miksys' father, then two years old) and took a horse and buggy all the way to Germany. They spent five years in a displaced persons' camp and then left to the U.S.
When Miksys was a young adult, his grandfather gave him a box of negatives from the journey. He scanned all the photographs, but one photograph—of his grandmother and father sitting on the buggy the day they left Lithuania—stuck with him. “I was really into Lewis Hine at the time," he says, "and the image looked like one of his pictures." That was when he knew he wanted to visit and work in Lithuania.
Unfortunately, Miksys’s respect for his ancestral lands hasn't convinced all Lithuanians that his hard-flash portraits aren't mocking. Last year, Lithuania's largest newspaper Lietuvos Rytas took umbrage, claiming that the series shows Lithuania in a bad light and that Miksys was involved in a conspiracy to destroy Lithuania's image abroad. By the end of the year, it was the fourth most read article the paper published in 2013. The Lithuanian embassy in London even translated the original Lietuovs Rytas article into English and posted it on its official Facebook page.
Many of the Lithuanian media outlets are owned by oligarchs, says Miksys, who calls the article "the same kind of journalism that was practiced in the USSR, a classic Soviet-style smear campaign" that was meant to distract people from the real problems facing the country: corruption and inequality.
Thankfully, all the muckraking in the world can't cover up a great photo.
