PALIUŠYTĖ, Gerda; NARBUTAITĖ, Elena (ed.)
Guys and Blue Flowers

The two photographic series featured in the book, Guys and Blue Flowers, explore the idea of seductive, fragile beauty removed and yet built from hard labour and standardised systems or practices (Yates Norton). This exploration intertwines the technological possibilities and errors of photography, the relationship between bodies and matter, the search for beauty and the subsequent frustration, and, ultimately, desire and the logic that quenches it.

The male bodies observed in Guys (ongoing since 2021) are abstracted, fragmented, sometimes almost completely blending into their surroundings. Although the original, Lithuanian title of the series (Vaikinai) reveals the gender of the lens’s subjects, the bodies in the photographs appear ephemeral, not necessarily gendered, almost random. Photography here becomes part of being together, and the artist's gaze raises questions about the legacy of traditional gender roles in the history of Eastern European photography.

The melancholic romanticism of Guys is further developed in Paliušytė’s next series of photographs, Blue Flowers (ongoing since 2022), featuring macro images of roses and orchids painted blue. While the male bodies in Guys are depicted as organic forms with an emphasis on their texture, the flowers in Paliušytė’s photographs resemble erotic, withering bodies. At the same time, although the enlarged images of flowers call for a closer look, they refuse to provide the visual sharpness that macro techniques normally promise. The frustration of an unfulfilled promise becomes an integral part of the series and of the book as a whole. [publishers’ note]

With a poem by Hannah Regel.

Published by Six Chairs Books, 2023
Design by Monika Janulevičiūtė
Photography / Artists' Books