Andrew Miksys Starts With A Question

How did your interest in the Roma community start?

I was in Vilnius in the years when I had a Fulbright grant, and I didn't really have a specific project or plan. I was just wandering around Vilnius and I came across a family in this one neighbourhood. I was so naive at that time. I was really not thinking about different ethnic groups, I just saw these really interesting people. I couldn't speak Lithuanian, but I photographed them, and it just started there. 

I showed the photographs to my new Lithuanian friends, and right away they had all these stereotypes about Roma people. It sparked something in me; those stereotypes had not been my experience of interacting with this family. So I slowly started working on it. Gradually my research took me around all these small villages and small towns, and I was learning about Lithuania at the same time as I was doing the project. 

For me, I start by coming across a question, and then while I'm doing the project, I'm learning about the subject. It has to be something I really want to learn about, because my projects go on for such long periods of time.

Why do you think you like to work over such long periods of time?

Well, with the Baxt project, I did a first edition in 2007. The second edition is more like a reinvention of the whole project. I made a lot of friends during this project, people I collaborate with on other things. There's one neighborhood in Vilnius near the airport where the Roma had lived since before the Second World War. When I was working on the first edition, the government started to tear down houses there. I kept going back and friends’ houses would be gone, and they weren't allowed to legally register these houses, even though they'd lived there decades, generations. Seeing that neighborhood get torn down little by little brought me back into the project. I would come and visit people, and think, ‘I'll take a few more pictures.’ And it just kept going like that. I like projects and books where you can feel that experience of something happening, a process or how things change.

The photographs in your 2013 book Disko arguably brought your work to a bigger audience, particularly a fashion audience. How did that project come about?

I was in a small town and I saw some kids going into this Soviet building in the middle of the day with beers and stuff. I followed them in and went up these stairs, and there was this bar. This is around 1998/99 and so a lot of these places hadn't been renovated. This building still had Lenin up on the wall, but the kids turned it into a club on the weekends. I thought, ‘I need to come back on Friday.’ So I just started coming back. Then I would photograph until 1am. It was about two hours from Vilnius, and I was driving back through other villages on the way home. I'd drive through these other towns with similar cultural centers and all these kids leaving, and I realised there was one in every town. I think back on it and I couldn't do it now. Every weekend I was driving through the middle of the night, in the winter sometimes, to these super remote places, and I photographed by myself. I don't like to be with other people.

Was it lonely? 

Yes, I would say so. When I think back on that time, on the weekends all my friends were going out, and I was going to these villages. But I have this stubbornness, and it pushes me forward. Even if things are uncomfortable, if I really have to do the project, then it’s okay with me. Now I'm getting older, I have kids, I prioritise things differently. Now I look back and think, ‘Oh, I couldn’t have done that, be so tunnel vision on the project.’

How did it feel to compile the Baxt book, having worked on this for so long?

This one I was ready to finish, I thought I would finish it a couple of years before this. But there was an exhibition of the photographs in 2022 at the new Mo Museum in Vilnius – with all these new collaborations with the Roma community – so I delayed the book. I have to give big credit to Claudia Ott, she designs all my books. She's from Dusseldorf. She makes the structure for the book, the sizes of images, and then we just go from there. It makes it so much easier. I do the covers and pick the materials, and I do all the printing here in Lithuania. I work with a printer here, and so I oversee every little detail. 

In terms of selecting images, you get to a point where you have 80, 100 pictures, and then you start to think, ‘Should this be in the book?’ and some of them just fall away. A book is a different experience too, if images repeat themselves too much, somehow the book form helps me clear out a little bit. The funny thing about Claudia is, she doesn't really speak English, and I don't speak German, so it's a super minimal discussion.

Your subjects often have quite distinctive stances, how do you develop your relationship with them?

For this project and my Disko project I came with this idea that people should look natural. People would start posing, I would take a few photos and then they would start to put their defenses down and just look natural. Later, though, the posing really became part of the project. I always say, the Roma have been in Europe for a thousand years, they've been in Lithuania for over 500 years. They've been marginalised, beaten down, they were enslaved in Romania, but they still have this pride that’s really strong. They keep their community, they survived all that history. I think in those pictures, sometimes it really comes out through the posing.

I'm interested by you choosing to live in Lithuania, in terms of it being a place you have a connection to through heritage.

I grew up in Seattle, and I didn't grow up with any kind of real ethnic identity. I had no interest, really, in coming back here, but my parents said, “No, you have to go.” On that first trip I said, “Okay, I’m going to Prague.” At that time, Prague and Budapest were the cool places, so I went there and tried to figure it out. 

Then I got on the train, I came here, and coming here, just right away it was different. Visually, it used to be part of the Soviet Union, and it still looked like that at the time. Then I had this personal connection, people I was related to, cousins that we never knew because of the Soviet Union. Having that connection, somehow it made everything real, whereas when I was in Prague or Budapest I didn't really feel anything. I wouldn't say living here is some ‘finding my roots’ thing exactly, because my projects really aren't about that at all. But I did have my grandfather's archive of photographs he took. He was a pretty serious amateur photographer. He was friends with a famous Lithuanian photographer, and when he they left Lithuania, he photographed along the way. My dad was also an amateur photographer. He had one of those first Nikon F cameras, and he was very serious. 

When did you realise photography was what you wanted to do?

I always had a point-and-shoot camera through high school, and then I ended up going to Hampshire College in Massachusetts. The first class I took, in my first semester, was with the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. There were 60 people who came to get into her class, so she had to draw names out of a hat, and luckily I was one of them. She was my advisor for two years. Also this other photographer, Jerome Liebling, who really became my mentor. 

What did you learn from Carrie Mae Weems?

At that time she was doing really amazing projects, and she also was giving lectures about Robert Mapplethorpe. She was a bit disturbed by a lot of his imagery of black men, and the racist stereotypes around them. I remember I would show her my stuff, and a few times I had tried to be very ‘contemporary art’. She saw that what I was truly interested in was history. It was a liberal arts college, so you had to study all these different things, like sociology and history. She had done a whole project about her family in Oregon, and I remember seeing that early on. I wouldn’t say she pushed me, but she said, “This looks more like your thing. Stay with that.” I did all these independent projects with her. Then I had Jerry Liebling, he was ill the first two years I was there, and then he came back and she left as her career had started to take off.

You said he was like a mentor to you? 

Jerry was this amazing documentary photographer. He had studied with Paul Strand and was in the photo league in New York. We had him for my last two years of college, and he would just have two students in his class. There weren’t really classes with Jerry. It was me and my friend Steve, and sometimes he'd come in and give us something to read, then we'd drive to his house to help him with some chores, drive in the car to pick up the dry cleaning. The whole time we were just talking about photography, and he knew everybody. He knew Diane Arbus, he knew Robert Frank. You're spending the whole day talking about this stuff, seeing how this real photographer lives and works. Then it might be weeks later, you’d realise all this stuff. 

Then when I graduated, he had really good friends in Mexico, so we went to Mexico together for about a month and just photographed. Then I lived in New Orleans, and he would come there, we'd drive around and photograph.

I wonder what your practice might have been without that experience.

It would be totally different. Education, everything has changed. That school is closing now, similar schools are very expensive. The whole structure of that school was that you had to design your own program. There was nobody telling you, “This is your grade.” So you really had to be motivated to make your own projects, and then I just continued doing that. 

What else are you working on at the minute? Do you have any other long projects?

So I'm now photographing in this town near where I live, that I first came to photograph for the Baxt project in 2006. It’s a shtetl [little town], but before World War Two there were 14,000 people here. The majority were Jewish, and most of them were killed. The town was almost abandoned, but now it's starting to come back a little bit. Both architecturally, and in terms of people, it's super interesting. I have an archive from Vilnius, pictures I took there that I've never shown, and then Kaunas, which used to be the capital Lithuania, where my father was born. Together they make a triangle. So I'm shooting new photographs for the part about this town, and then I want to put it together with the other two parts. But that might take many, many years. I had an idea last year, I thought, ‘I’m going to shoot here for three months.’ Of course, it didn’t work. So I’m still going.