A Box of Old Negatives and a Small-Town Lithuanian Disco

Something about inheriting a box of old negatives from a grandparent who fled a country that no longer exists the same way—that’s a specific kind of weight. Not grief exactly, more like receiving a question you didn’t ask for and don’t yet know how to answer. Photographer Andrew Miksys got that question from his grandfather, who handed him photographs taken in Lithuania before the family’s wartime flight to the United States, and years later Miksys followed the question back to the source.

He arrived in a small Lithuanian village and walked into a local disco. Not a glamorous club—a small-town dance hall of the post-Soviet variety, bad lighting, loud music, everyone there because there wasn’t anywhere else. He didn’t know anyone and spoke only fragments of Lithuanian. It’s strange to show up alone to this strange place not knowing anyone, he said. I was a complete outsider, but almost always the people there were very friendly to me. I wanted to document all of this before it disappears forever.

What came out of those nights is the photography series Disko—faces and bodies caught in the specific fluorescent intimacy of cheap club nights, people mid-dance or mid-drink or just standing in the neon glow as if waiting for something. The images have a quality that’s difficult to manufacture: the photographer was genuinely a stranger, the strangers knew it, and they let him in anyway.

Projects like this are the ones I keep coming back to, not because of technique or formal ambition but because they start with a personal question that has no obvious answer. Miksys wasn’t going to Lithuania to document poverty or post-Soviet nostalgia for a Western audience. He was trying to find something in a box of old photographs given to him by an old man. Whether he found it isn’t really the point. The work exists now.