Gretė Tvarkūnaitė, discovering exceptional stories: “I’m more of a storyteller than a photographer” | Multimedia storytelling

I started taking photos in my early teens, when I started spending more time on city streets than in my garden. It was like a game for me – click the button for a fleeting moment, and she’s mine. A man in a long leather coat is walking around the school stadium in high heels, and he thinks so. Crows “fold” their thick shadows on the electric wires – yes, they are mine too.

I have always been curious, I liked to listen and tell stories, to study how man changes space and space changes man. It is precisely for this that photography became the most appropriate tool to capture, which later expanded into interdisciplinary documentary narratives.

This curiosity later pushed me to choose a field of study: in 2013 I went to England, I finished a bachelor’s degree in photography there, and in 2017 – MA in Digital Media at the University of Huddersfield. During my studies, I started traveling a lot and hitchhiked through a good part of Europe.

After graduating, I went to Southeast Asia. While working remotely as a fashion photography editor, I searched for subjects for my documentary stories. Eventually, my passions for travel, research and creativity merged – this is how the first stories “One-Dimensional Society” and “Cup of Tea” were born. Well, the photo cycles “Regione Nubibus” and “Tana Toraja” appeared a little later during purposeful trips.

I’m more of a storyteller than a photographer. I am interested in stories told not according to journalistic principles, but more in the way of slow documentary photography, combining experimental and artistic solutions, filmed images, and even poetry interludes. In this way, the current narrative is based on the very core of humanity and bears witness to what is eternal. I believe that through the artistic prism of photography and video art, both the time of the past and the inevitable changes of the future merge, as well as the present charged with vital energy.