One more moment and everything will be different 0
In brief: Dimitrijus Matvejevas remembers how the camera appeared in his hands: “I think everybody felt that the room in red light was a certain miracle earlier. This feeling is gone now, however. Today the noise of the amount of information is very dangerous. You may miss important things due to it. Photography or music – everyone puts different things into these words. There is some silent photography and there is some loud photography.”
The photographer believes that photography of theatre is reproduction of a performance: “You photograph what others have already done. Still, I am satisfied with it, I am satisfied with everything that has happened. People engage in things that are interesting to them.”
Speaking about theatre photography, the artist emphasises that theatre needs photographs. According to him, a theatre photographer is the one working in theatre and ensuring that theatre has material for advertisements and information. This is not art. Other photographs are made before a performance. This is more interesting to the photographer and one may contribute to an unfinished product, differently from the photography of a completed performance.
“I cannot describe my photographs but I may say what one should strive for. One has to feel that he/she did well. A precise photograph captures the moment which makes one think that one more moment and everything will be different,” the photographer speaks.
Arturas Valiauga mentions that he loved cinema in his young years and that he later started photographing scenarios he wanted to film once. “I was interested in the genre of directed documentary from which I did not distance much in photography. Cinema remained an ambition to me as I participated in amateur cinema movement and had thoughts to get to the professional cinema earlier. In any case, I do not complain about staying with photography.”
The photographer is engaged in research photography, which is based on idea, concept, scenario and text. In a certain meaning it is a form of ordered photography, when certain committees, organisations, funds and galleries become customers and use the made photographs for their purposes. “Photography as media helps to capture the fact and also the status: a certain context or circumstances of some existing fact that determined the appearance of some event or its consequences, or perhaps reasons. The aim of research photography is to create a certain contextual situation about some events or a man, about relations; it is photography of social kind, a social research or photography as a means, a social research method,” the photographer A.Valiauga tells about his work.
Speaking about the aims of his photographs, the artist states: “I am an artist for whom the process is important. Sometimes you surprise yourself with some discoveries – you start from a small thing and develop a story without any aim to please the customer. I do not have an aim to save the world by my photographs.”
At the moment the photographer is creating the visual conception for the advertisement of the coming season of the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre. The artist finds himself in a strange situation: we see life as theatre in various photographs and publications, meanwhile, theatre wants to show a different position, that theatre is the place where the real life is revealed. “The situation becomes paradoxical – to create advertisement for the theatre that wants to position itself as reality. Ambiguity appears, and at the same time it becomes interesting to manoeuvre among these things. It is rather complicated to show actors as common people and to tear off the aura of a star from them,” the artist reveals.
