In the 1930s, during the times of the Great Depression in the United States, a group of photographers kept recording views which were soon destined to fade into obscurity. The continuous migration of people moving around in search of easier conditions of life was relentlessly changing the demographical map of the States: homesteads, villages, small towns were disappearing right before the eyes. All this was photographed and put into extensive archives – the effort of those photographers proved not to have been in vain.
A somehow different (thought the outcome is quite similar) process is ongoing in the present-day Lithuania too. Neither in the scope nor the conditions of life should those two situations be compared, though something still prompts us to look for similarities. Just within the last decade, this continuous migration has caused the population of Lithuania to shrink by almost one sixth. Towns that have usurped the whole economics and are sucking out young people to the cities. All this changes the country, which is why Tadas Kazakevičius tries to register with his camera what will soon be gone.

Tadas Kazakevičius – Lithuanian photo-documentalist. He has been taking photographs for eight years, he is particularly interested in the social problems of Lithuanians. A supporter of traditional analog photography. In 2014, he won the Lithuanian Press Photography Contest in the portrait category. Author of several photographic series. The “Strangers” series was devoted to the elderly, the hero of another project was Shmuel, “a child of Buchenwald”, saved from the concentration camp. His other projects include “The Hardening of Steel”, “Fishermen Nida”, “A Participant of the 1948 Olympic Games” and “The Children of Šilėnai”.