Linas Vaitonis

Creative Statement

My name is Linas Vaitonis. I was born and raised in Vilnius, Lithuania. The city is lively, cozy and relaxed. I'm lucky to live in its medieval old town which is very beautiful and inspiring. It has a huge influence on my work and who I am.

I certainly don’t have the classical art school background because technically I’m an ecologist. Since I’ve got my master’s degree from Vilnius university, I have been working with various environmental projects, nature sciences laboratories and ecology consulting companies. I also worked as an editor for several years right after I finished high school. I started taking pictures just for fun. When I was twenty, I took my mother’s Nikon and started to shoot. I took pictures of literally everything. It was an obsession.

I try to take visually exceptional pictures and I don’t want to make any big statement by the way I present them. These stories are somewhere between the odd and the ordinary. Dream-like images revolve around the mystery and the secret. Continuous duality expressed through light, composition, colour, character and the truth about fiction and manipulation leads to inventions and playfulness. However, the pictures still refer to a world that real people inhabit.

Locating what is beautiful is always a challenge but the biggest difficulty I encounter creating my pictures is in making sure that the final images are just like I imagined them in my head. I like to play with unusual locations, trying to tell a story. In my opinion, the overall feel should be like in a movie, where the atmosphere plays an important role in transmitting the message. I'm striving to create a feeling that there is something yet to be revealed to come through in my work.

• LinasWasHere
• www.linaswashere.com