Summer photography news in the Baltics
ESTONIA
23.05.2025 – 26.10.2025 Fotografiska Gallery, Tallinn
Bruce Gilden’s fiercely bold exhibition Why These? shines a light on the wide spectrum of society, bringing to center stage real people from back alleys, everyday life, and the true, unfiltered corners of the world. With a raw, provocative close-up style, Gilden’s dark humor serves a brighter purpose – to foster greater understanding between people. By exposing what lies just beneath the surface, he captures the fears that shape how we see ourselves and those around us.
Bruce Gilden, (b. 1946), a legend in the world of street photography, began his career in 1967. He captures scenes and people that others might consider intimidating, risky, or even repulsive. He is never merely a spectator, but actively seeks out faces that reveal more than they conceal – signs of grief and joy, desire and loss, intoxication and destruction. It is like a map of life.
23.05.2025 – 28.09.2025 Fotografiska Gallery, Tallinn
This summer, Fotografiska Tallinn will present Kaleidoscope, an exhibition by Danish artist Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen. Blurring the boundaries between photography and painting, reality and imagination, the exhibition explores the depths of the human psyche and body. Trained as a medical doctor, Ebbesen is fascinated by the intersection of science and art. Her works function as small scientific experiments, examining how the human body, psyche, and world can be visualized and interpreted through the viewer’s mind and gaze.
Henriette Sabroe Ebbesen (born 1994) is a self-taught photographer and film director from Copenhagen, fascinated by the intersection of science and art. Her exploration of the psyche, mind, and body is reflected in a range of works — from self-portraits and fragmented faces to distorted nude forms and Daliesque still lifes — celebrating sexuality and expression through her female gaze.
21.03.2025 – 07.09.2025, Fotografiska Gallery, Tallinn
This spring, Fotografiska Tallinn presents Through Elliott Erwitt’s Playful Eyes, a retrospective exhibition celebrating the legendary photographer Elliott Erwitt (1928–2023). This exhibition explores Erwitt’s seven decades of creative photography, highlighting playful everyday moments, humorous perspectives, and thought-provoking reflections. It is Fotografiska’s tribute to the extraordinary journey and talent of the legendary artist, showcasing nearly 100 images that represent the pinnacle of street photography.
Erwitt had a rare ability to be in the right place at the right time, and his visual language is marked by a subtle wit that captures the warmth, playfulness, and emotional richness of everyday life. The exhibition features his iconic black-and-white photographs alongside lesser-known works, including some of his earliest images from 1949 and a selection of color photographs from his later creative period.
06.06.2025 – 27.09.2025, Gallery Seek, Tallinn
The exhibition invites visitors on a poetic and sensorial journey through a landscape where body and nature are inseparably entangled. “The theme of the bog was not a conscious choice,” says the artist. “It came to me gradually—like a landscape you begin to sink into.”
A move from Tallinn to a remote farmhouse in Lahemaa brought an unexpected encounter with moisture, decay, and a quiet resistance to human control. This marked the beginning of a long dialogue with the land—not as backdrop, but as a layered, remembering being.
The exhibition SOO asks: What does the land preserve? What does the human body leave behind? Where does care begin—and where does it end? The installations, composed of vegetable-tanned leather, glass, wood remnants, rusted metal, photo-chemical processes and light, are not explanations but companions—memory-carriers that do not speak loudly, but echo, sink, and remain.
09.05.2025 – 10.08.2025, Juhan Kuus Documentary Photo Centre
Pavlo Mazai is a Ukrainian artist whose work acts as a mirror, reflecting Ukraine’s culture, history, and present-day through diverse and emotionally resonant photography. Born, living, and working in Kyiv, Pavlo’s life—like the world around him—is fluid and constantly in motion. After thirteen years of a faultless career in customs, he chose the path of art. His passion for photography became his new vocation. Crossing boundaries is in his nature.
This exhibition is far more than a collection of visually cohesive photographs. It is a poetic and existential journey that encourages viewers to reflect on the fragility of life. In the context of the Juhan Kuus Documentary Photo Centre, it expands the meaning of documentary photography, transforming it from a mirror of the world into a tool for exploring the human inner landscape.
The exhibition is part of the first-ever Ukrainian Art Festival in Estonia.
LITHUANIA
09.07.2025 – 07.09.2025, Museum of Photography, Šiauliai
The exhibition is a joint creative project of photographer Mykolas Juodelė and Argentinian Lithuanian Sandra Rivero, exploring the history and present of the Lithuanian diaspora in Argentina.
Between the wars, more than 30 000 Lithuanians emigrated to Argentina to escape poverty and political instability. Among them were Sandra Rivero’s great-grandparents Povilas Lipnickas and Adelė Baršauskaitė, who left Daujėnai in 1925 for Buenos Aires. Sandra learned about her Lithuanian roots when she was a teenager, and a long search for her family history eventually led her to the same church in Daujėnai where her great-grandparents were married almost a century ago.
During their ten-month-long travels in Argentina and Lithuania, the authors collected archival material, interviewed dozens of Argentine Lithuanians, and visited Argentine Lithuanian communities from Buenos Aires to Esquel and from Rosario to Sarmiento. The series of photographs is complemented by archival photographs, fragments of diaries and letters of the emigrants, while the text inserts convey both historical contexts and personal narratives.
03.07.2025 – 02.08.2025, Vilnius Photography Gallery
The exhibition Generalized Gaze invites viewers to stand alongside the photographer behind the camera and look at the image through the concept of spacetime.
This cycle of works is the result of photographic performativity. Moving parallel to the horizon, the author records the duration of space, emphasizing the process and the intention of his compositional search. Observing his extended framings and the absence of gaps between frames on the film strip, viewers can find an answer to the questions “what lies outside the frame?” and “what is happening there?”
For his compositions, Kuncaitis chooses courtyards, streets, and stairwells of Vilnius — visiting these places with both his gaze and his steps, he intimately reveals the key elements of their compositional arrangement. Almost every work contains a sense of movement and rhythm unfolding around — these are passersby who suddenly enter the frame, the ghostly silhouette of a running child, the leftover light trails of a passing car, or gradually darkening clouds. These elements provoke the feeling that one can look straight ahead while also perceiving what happens to the left, right, and behind.
01.07.2025 – 26.07.2025, Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius
In this solo exhibition, Tania Serket presents her new analog double-exposure photographs created in 2023–2024. The works on display come from the series On a Black Background, Red Ribbon, Equilibrium, Foldings, and Transfigure.
Red ribbon, or that which is important — this could be considered the leitmotif of this photographic cycle if we were to liken the art of photography to a theatrical work. All compositions were created in the same place, with the same character and similar props, while the variety of forms and meanings is found in light, movement, and layers of double exposure.
The cycle was created by capturing still lifes and “catching” the figure’s movements against a black wall and combining these different materials. The still lifes act as decoration, while the figure is an insignificant character allowing the effects of light and color to emerge.
23.05.2025 – 28.09.2025, Radvila Palace Museum of Art
Janina Sabaliauskaitė, working from Lithuania and Great Britain, subtly documents the life of LGBTQ+ community, the expression of their sexuality, joy and of communal spirit. To pursue issues of identity and gender, she dives into the themes of the erotic, of sexual education, and of disability. Her art is about intimacy and collaboration. The artist openly explores the relationships within the queer feminist society and the aesthetics of vitality.
The exhibition Pleasure, like other projects by the artist, started from conversations and attention to her models. The project records some of the most touching and powerful moments in the life of eleven participants, evocative of self-love, passion and eroticism, of attraction, potency, dreams, challenges and desires. All of these images are linked not only by the theme of sexuality. Disability – another phenomenon, often in the shadow of society life, also comes out in the prints. The exhibition underscores that life with disability, disfunction and individual needs is as diverse and unpredictable as any other, thus, in order to help these humans to live their life to the full, not depriving them of interaction, movement, sex, culture and entertainment, all these aspects of life have to be organized outside one “universal” norm, which disregards those frail or in constant pain.
LATVIA
07.06.2025 – 18.07.2025, ISSP Gallery
In collaboration with Fonderia 20.9, the project is curated by Rocco Venezia and supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024). Sinestesia marks the continuation of the artist’s long-term project A Study on Waitressing, in which Agostini draws upon the three dimensions of theatre—the stage, the backstage, and the performative—to question how roles are embodied and perceived. The show will present a selected collection of photographs, archival materials, audio and texts, each piece engaging deeply with themes of visibility, process, and performativity.
Central to this investigation is the figure of Agostini’s mother, whose gestures, movements, and behaviors as a waitress become the focal point of an exploration into the performative nature of social roles. The restaurant is reimagined as a stage, where the body connects the observer and the observed, weaving a narrative oscillating between individuality and societal expectations. A Study on Waitressing challenges viewers to consider the layers of existence within social interactions, the roles we play, and the fluid boundaries between the real and the staged.
31.05.2025 – 18.07.2025, Gallery Alma, Riga
“Around a dozen years ago, my aunt Zoņa passed away. At the time, I had recently started to take photos and was infatuated with the great photographers of the Magnum photo agency – mostly men of French, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon origin, who created photographic stories under the aegis of the agency, which was established in 1947, documenting life and conflicts across the world. Magnum photographers arrived at the scene as neutral observers in order to see the dramas of others through their lenses, then got their planes, returned to Paris and analyzed the collected shots, looking for the most successful compositions. I was consumed by the idea that my mission likewise was to document as objectively as possible life as it is. Armed with a 35mm camera and a few black-and-white Ilford films, I went to the funeral, thinking about how Cartier-Bresson might have seen it.”
20.06.2025 – 02.08.2025, Gallery ASNI
Pēteris Vīksna’s solo exhibition This Feels Familiar is a story about urban space and its visual language. Over the course of more than five years, the artist has built up an impressive photo archive, in which he studies the contrasting moods of Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, Amsterdam and other cities. In Pēteris’s photographs, the urban environment serves as matter – basis for anthropological study. A man-made trajectory can have its meaning altered when subjected to photographic fragmentation. The meanings assigned to a place are forgotten when a framing highlights new details. Writer and curator Charlotte Cotton writes that one of the most dramatic approaches to still life in photography is when photographers investigate how we see (or – on the contrary – do not see) the things that surround us. In this way, attention is drawn specifically to our perception of things. This approach can easily be linked to Vīksna’s work.
12.07.2025 – 05.10.2025, Global centre for Latvian Art Gallery, Cēsis, Lielā Skolas street 6
Ulvis Alberts is known for his portrait photographs of American actors, musicians, poker players and other celebrities. Born in Latvia in 1942, Alberts fled with his family to Germany, from where they later moved to the United States. Starting in the late 1960s, Alberts gained recognition by publishing photographs in several prominent US magazines. Alberts’ works are significant in the context of world photography as an archive of creative personalities and events. His works feature portraits of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Tina Turner, Stev
