Spring photography news in the Baltics
ESTONIA
29.01.2025 – 20.04.2025, Fotografiska Tallinn
Internationally acclaimed street and fashion photographer Feng Li has developed a distinctive visual language — his photos stand out in a world saturated with images for their unique ability to embrace irony and highlight the humor in everyday life.
The White Nights series is set against the backdrop of modern cities, focusing on the gritty, messy, and shamelessly artificial playgrounds of the streets—elements often cropped out in photos taken with smartphones. His vivid, silent images capture fleeting, mysterious moments and the absurdities of everyday life, evoking complex emotions under the bright glare of a flash that distorts the sense of time and blurs the boundary between night and day.
Feng Li skillfully employs technique, timing, composition, light, and color, with his signature mastery of the flash. He has a unique ability to notice and capture peculiar and surreal moments, weaving them together with explosive colors and evocative details.
24.01.2025 – 18.05.2025, Fotografiska Tallinn
Fotografiska welcomes the year 2025, during which Tallinn holds the title of European Capital of Sport, with a focus on Estonian sports photography. On January 24, Fotografiska will open an exhibition titled ‘Peegel/Pildis’ by the legendary sports photographer Lembit Peegel. This is Peegel’s first solo exhibition, showcasing numerous previously unseen images from his vast collection.
The exhibition offers audiences a glimpse into the work of sports photographer Lembit Peegel, featuring powerful and striking photographs that capture aspects of Estonian sports culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, along with fragments of more recent sports moments. Lembit Peegel, often working as a volunteer at the time, traveled to sports competitions with his camera, driven by passion, dedication, and determination. His exceptional ability to capture the beauty, charm, and pain of sports preserved authentic and vivid moments of sports history on film, contributing to the cultural narrative of Estonia.
15.02.2025 — 15.03.2025, Gallery Pallas, Tartu
The exhibition, organized by the Finnish Institute, features new and older photographs by Elina Brotherus of buildings designed by Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). Elina Brotherus’ works differ from traditional architectural photographs – Brotherus brings a human presence to the images, an imaginary inhabitant through whose eyes the viewer sees the space.
The new, previously unpublished photos were taken at the end of July 2024 in Villa Tammekann in Tartu, which is the only building designed by Aalto in the Baltic States. The house belongs to the University of Turku Foundation and has served as a research residence for the University of Turku in recent years, which is why Tartu residents have rarely had the opportunity to see its interior.
14.02.2025 — 15.03.2025, Gallery Pallas, Tartu
The exhibition Our Houses features 24 students and lecturers from the Pallas University of Applied Sciences photography department, exploring architecture as a form of self-expression.
“This exhibition is about shared experiences – building friendships, expanding one’s worldview, and growing together. Architecture is an integral part of human-made culture, as natural and essential as collaboration, exchanging ideas, and expressing emotions,” says curator Katariina Torm.
The participating photographers use architecture as a means of introspection, creating a dialogue with architects—individuals who express their creativity through shaping the surrounding environment and space. At the intersection of these two disciplines, a synergy emerges, helping to unravel both the intuitive choices behind architectural subjects and their deeper meanings.
13.02.2025 — 15.03.2025, Vaal Galerii, Tallinn
Tõnu Tormis presents 200 black-and-white photographs from the years 1964-2008. That series is called Behind the Times, and over several decades Tormis has captured mainly cultural figures. Peeter Linnap, head of the Pallas photo department, has noted that many Estonian photographers have considered capturing the portraits of cultural figures as their number one mission. “As if sensing the permanent and tragic risk of our nation’s ethnic disappearance, there has been a systematic effort throughout Estonia’s history to record and catalogue those who we call the ‘elite’ – the intellectual vanguard whose legacy has endured despite the endless history of tempests from the East and West.”
lmar Kruusamäe presents nine hyperrealistic paintings, including portraits already known from art exhibitions (Eha Komissarov, Marko Mäetamm, Tõnis Mägi), as well as some of his latest creations (Lembit Sarapuu, Riho Sibul, Albert Gulk). Like Tormis, Kruusamäe started portraying cultural figures already at the end of the last century. As of today, there are 45 depictions in his portrait series “Landscapes of the Soul”. Kruusamäe’s large-scale artworks have been time-consuming: as a painter, he follows a process-based approach, with each portrait taking around a year to finish, sometimes even longer.
07.02.2025 — 23.03.2025, Vana-Võromaa Museum and Art Gallery
Filmmaker Ago Ruus will open his solo exhibition The Invitation in the small hall of the Cultural Center’s gallery on February 7. The exhibition introduces photographs that were taken years ago when the Tallinnfilm film crew followed the tracks of the Baltic German polar explorer and scientist Eduard von Toll in the Arctic. The goal of the Estonian film expedition was to capture the moods that accompany explorers who long to look beyond the horizon and move on previously untraveled paths – accepting the invitation of the distances.
LITHUANIA
06.03.2025 – 06.04.2025, Photography museum, Šiauliai
The exhibition presents reportage works created in the 1970s-9s, revealing the author’s ambition to capture authentic everyday life in various parts of the world. Carpenter’s works are dominated by direct observation and documentation of real events, avoiding artistic staging or special staging. Visitors to the exhibition will see photographs taken in Dagestan, Cuba and Lithuania, where each photograph tells its own story – from fragments of local people’s lives to signs of social change.
26.02.2025 – 03.04.2025, Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius
Romualdas Augūnas is known among photography enthusiasts and professionals as a mountain photographer. His album People in the Mountains, published in 2002, marked the most important theme of this photographer, which distinguished him from other authors of the Lithuanian photography school.
2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the historic expedition – recorded by Augūnas, who participated in it – to the Pamir Mountains. In early 1964, In the autumn of 2008, the Lithuanian press flashed with headlines – “Lithuanian names that have left the mountains”, “Lithuanian peaks in the Pamirs”… That summer, the first high-altitude expedition of Lithuanian mountaineers took place in Tajikistan to the Pamir Mountains – ten then still quite young men, who had already experienced their baptism of fire in mountain climbing and contracted “mountain sickness”. And the highlight of this expedition – the previously nameless peaks of the Pamirs that were conquered and given Lithuanian names: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (5794 m), Kristijonas Donelaitis (5837 m), Lithuania (6050 m). All of them surpass the highest European mountain Elbrus (5642 m) in height! This February, Augūnas, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the expedition and the 150th anniversary of M. K. Čiurlionis, invites photography fans to an exhibition that immortalizes the legendary achievement of the hikers and the process of marking the ridges of Lithuanian peaks.
27.01.2025 – 31.03.2025, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania
The exhibition I Often Forget explores the fragile layer of time in everyday spaces. Jonas Kulikauskas, using a World War II-era lens and a modern 8 x 10-inch camera, embarked on a journey to capture contemporary life in the former Vilnius Ghetto, in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The photographs are exhibited as objects, giving visitors a tactile experience. Binders with photographic silver prints mounted on tables and pedestals, combining contemporary scenes with historical descriptions of a specific place and testimonies of survivors, present horrifying memories of the Vilnius Ghetto, where tens of thousands of Jews were forcibly held.
The installations shed light on the history, conflicts, resistance, survival, confusion and trauma associated with the Holocaust, historical silence, ethnic and cultural desecration. The exhibition pays tribute to the oldest and most significant monument of Litvak Jews, the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, as well as to the tens of thousands of people murdered in Paneriai Forest during the Holocaust.
27.11.2024 – 11.05.2025, House of Histories, Vilnius
Antanas Sutkus had been part of the nomenklatura since the 1970s as a service provider for that privileged class and later as Vice President of the Lithuanian Society of Art Photography.
Through his work as a journalist and artist, the three parts of the exhibition – Everyday Life, Parades and Nomenklatura – give us a chance to gain insight into life within and outside the nomenklatura. At the invitation of the party and individual members, Sutkus photographed both official and unofficial events, creating very revealing portraits and atmospheric images from among the circles of power. Fortunately for us, Sutkus was and is a photographer with outstanding skills and a certain tenacity. Both of these qualities meant that he also kept photos that were not of immediate interest to the party or the nomenklatura, but rather were off the beaten track or would not have passed by censors. This gives us a clearer view of a time that fortunately belongs to the past, even if we can still see and feel its effects on society and the country today.
LATVIA
07.02.2025 – 18.04.2025, ISSP Gallery, Riga
The exhibition explores unfinished architectural narratives in urban spaces, revealing a liminal state between presence and oblivion. Skeletons of unfinished buildings and monumental elitist high-rises become artefacts of the urban spectacle – testimonies that transcend public imagination and reflect the voices of ignored communities. Andže employs early analogue photographic techniques such as daguerreotype and dry glass plate methods to highlight the exhibition’s themes. Developed in the early 19th century, the daguerreotype is one of the earliest photographic processes, using a silver-plated sheet of copper to produce a singular image characterized by high detail and a mirror-like surface. Through these techniques, Andže emphasizes the transient nature of landscapes and the tangible presence of the photographic image, in which past and future collide. Each image displayed in the exhibition is unique, existing as a single, irreplaceable artefact.
From 17.01.2025, Latvian Museum of Photography, Riga
With the start of 2025, the relocation of the Latvian Museum of Photography to the Art Academy of Latvia building at 4 Kronvalda Boulevard has been successfully completed. To celebrate this milestone, the museum’s public space will host the exhibition Moment. Colour. Mirror. The Autochrome Collection from January 17, presenting this unique collection from the early 20th century for the first time in the museum’s history.
Shortly after 1907, when the autochrome—the first commercially successful color photography process—was patented by the Lumière brothers, Latvian photographers began creating color photographs on glass plates. Due to their fragile nature, relatively few autochromes have survived. The Latvian Museum of Photography holds the second-largest collection of autochromes in Latvia, consisting mainly of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits by Eduards Gaiķis (1881–1961). The research process has also identified autochromes preserved in other museums and private collections, providing insight into the number of such works available in Latvia.
22.11.2024. – 30.03.2025, Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum
From 22 November 2024, an exhibition entitled Gleizds, Paper, Scissors is on view at Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum. Dedicated to the link between the creative experiments of the photographer Jānis Gleizds (1924–2010) and the scientific surgical research of the time, the exhibition intertwines subjects like disability and Soviet erotica, the aesthetics of a medically transformed body and the first steps toward social acceptance of the divergent into a single cohesive story.
The exhibition focuses on the photographer Jānis Gleizds’ work in the 1970s and 1980s with particular emphasis on the lengthy collaboration between the artist and surgeons at the Traumatology and Orthopaedics Research Institute. In a time when the official art scene had to conform with the Soviet regime, Gleizds, the Institute’s photo lab assistant, untrained in arts, and the surgeons, whose experimental practice was artlike in its creativity, developed the aesthetic principles behind cutting-edge technological solutions that would allow erotic imagination endow the ideologized body of the Soviet citizen with sexual characteristics enveloped in an aura of light. Exhibition curated by Anna Volkova and Vladimirs Svetlovs.
