Disko
My grandfather fled Lithuania during the war. Years later I got a box of his old negatives—photographs from before he left, from a time and place that no longer existed. Reason enough to go back to somewhere I’d never actually lived.
I ended up at a small disco in a small village, barely speaking the language, knowing nobody in the room. I just started taking pictures. Pure outsider, but people let me be there. They danced and drank and existed while I pointed a camera at them, trying to hold onto something that felt temporary even as it was happening.
I wasn’t chasing some grand documentary project or trying to preserve a vanishing culture. I just wanted to understand something about where I came from, maybe hold onto a moment I could feel slipping away. When you show up somewhere with a camera, your reasons get muddy pretty fast. You just keep shooting.
What stayed with me was the uncertainty of it all. No guarantee the pictures meant anything, no assumption anyone else would care, no safe reason to be doing this at all. He wanted to document something before it disappeared. That’s the best kind of project—unguaranteed, personal, driven by something genuine rather than something you can explain away. You don’t need permission. You just need to care.