Mindaugas Kavaliauskas & Simas Kavaliauskas: My America (2000)
October 8, 6:00 p.m.
Mindaugas Kavaliauskas first arrived in the United States on February 16, 2000—a date that has always stayed with him. America turned out to be quite different from what the movies had promised. After landing at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the car took him down Cicero Avenue—an endless chain of strip malls where piles of dirty snow, derelict buildings, dented cars, and dim streetlights fit neither the festive mood nor the country portrayed in films and stories. The photographer asked himself—was this really the place he had set out for?
Over the next six months, the imagined America in Mindaugas’s photographs became a seen, tasted, experienced, cherished, loved, pitied, and at times awkward and irritating one. Born of participant observation, the images reflect not only places, landscapes, and people, but also the photographer’s own “earmarks”—the objects he owned and the environments he inhabited: the interior of the car he drove, the window of the room where he stayed, breakfast tables, and the people he encountered—familiar, famous, or entirely anonymous—often looking straight into the lens, in other words, straight at him.
In building his own America in photographs, Mindaugas did not only shoot passively—he often took an active role in the compositions. At times he recorded others’ reactions to him; at others he visualized his own reactions to what he saw around him.
While studying photography in France, Mindaugas became fascinated by documentary photography—especially Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, and William Eggleston—and America itself appeared to him as a compelling subject. Its aesthetic imperfections and descriptive vignettes allowed him, instead of keeping a diary, to photograph feelings, emotions, and states of mind reflected in My America: from excitement to nostalgia, from comfortable contentment to melancholy, from thirst to loneliness, from the play of light and color to fatigue. And in encounters with Lithuanian Americans, he discovered yet another piece of himself.
A quarter of a century later, the photographer has digitized the entire archive from the year 2000 for the first time, which he will present at the IPMA Festival event on October 8, 2025.
He will be joined by his son, Simas Kavaliauskas — composer, producer, and performer. Simas’s guitar will echo with inspirations from his own America.