CAMERA OBSCURA

ABOUT ME

Born in Crawley, England on September 2, 1964, I'm a trained journalist and a former filmmaker, travel writer and documentary photographer who’s lived and worked in Lithuania since June 2001. Today, I’m a full-time photo historian and provenance researcher, specialising in all aspects of pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photography, photographers and photographs. Held at gunpoint twice—while filming on the Russian-Chinese border in November 1997, and again in a remote region in central Cuba a year later—I'm the paternal grandson of the English pilot, author and wartime farmer, Harry Methuen Schofield.

EDUCATION

I was awarded an MA (with Distinction) on the groundbreaking Photojournalism & Documentary Photography programme at the London College of Communication in 2009 for a project shot in Lithuania on a ‘technically lamentable’ Nokia E61i mobile phone. Several photographs from this and other E61i projects were combined into the e-book, Nokumentary™, which was published in New York by Dutch Kills Press in March 2015.  

EMPLOYMENT

I didn’t do very well at secondary school, and I consequently spent the first 10 years or so of my working life doing a variety of unskilled jobs from cleaning rich people's houses to working for a small removal and delivery company, most of which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Obsessed with films and filmmaking from an early age, in the late 1980s I began borrowing a friend’s video camera and started making my own low budget documentaries. In November 1998, I was commissioned by the UK public broadcaster Channel 4 to produce, shoot and edit five short films in Cuba that were broadcast every evening immediately after the Channel 4 News during the first week on 1999 as part of the channel's 40th anniversary commemoration of the Cuban Revolution. A chance meeting with a travel writer while researching a documentary film in Bucharest in October 1999 resulted in the offer of a job in Lithuania. In June 2001, I became Editor-in-Chief of the bi-monthly (and once legendary) Vilnius In Your Pocket print guide. I continued working for In Your Pocket as a freelance writer, editor, photographer and production manager in 11 European countries until September 2019.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

One the same day our MA group exhibition opened at the Printspace Gallery in London in March 2010, I was commissioned by a UK-based travel publisher to spend six weeks travelling and taking photographs in Russia, an adventure I wrote about for a British photography magazine the following year. Always more interested in other people's photographs than my own, I subsequently curated two small exhibitions of never-before-seen photographs of everyday life in the Soviet Union at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival in October 2012 and Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College in April 2013. Five months after the Cambridge exhibition, I accidentally stumbled upon a collection of just over 100 pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish family photographs that had been smuggled out of the Kovno Ghetto by an unknown person or persons in October 1943, an event that quite simply changed my life. The discovery generated an enormous amount of activity over the next few years, with highlights including a fascinating experimental music project, collectively known as The Kaunas Requiem, and a major exhibition I co-curated at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York in October 2018. Having failed to rescue and renovate an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas whilst simultaneously attempting to photograph every surviving former synagogue in Lithuania while hitchhiking around the country in August 2017 (read the combined adventure story here), I was asked to join an international project with Jewish organisations in Latvia and Sweden in which we devised a Jewish heritage travelling summer school, the first of which took place in July 2019, and that we continue to run every couple of years. Five years before we set off on our first travelling summer school, I established a public engagement-focused nonprofit organisation, the International Centre for Litvak Photography, that was responsible for several of the above projects, as well as 'Fifty Schools', a year-long informal education project funded by the Good Will Foundation during which myself and my colleague, Mariana Iljina, visited dozens (not quite 50) of high schools throughout Lithuania.  After spending the first lockdown helping to look after my dying father in Eastbourne during the spring and early summer of 2020, I returned to Lithuania at the end of June, where I was awarded a small research grant from the Lithuanian Council for Culture that enabled me to begin a long-term investigation that gradually evolved into Camera Obscura, the first project managed by my new nonprofit organisation, the Data Brigade, that replaced the International Centre for Litvak Photography in May 2024. Camera Obscura (↓) was officially launched on January 1, 2025, and is still very much in the early stages of development. It's hoped that The Life & Times of Leon Balk will become its first in-depth micro-project. 

EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

November 2009—Daily Life Revisited A week-long solo exhibition inside a re-purposed shop in a Vilnius shopping centre as part of my MA final project. 

March-April 2010—16 Photographers Daily Life Revisited (↑↓) in a group exhibition at the Printspace Gallery in London as part of my MA final project. A short piece about Daily Life Revisited by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.

October 2012—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the Brighton Photo Fringe Festival. A short piece about the Snapshot Citizens project by Phil Coomes on the BBC website is here.

April 2013—Snapshot Citizens Curated exhibition at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies' Annual Congress at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College.

2014—Performance Without an Audience & Other Experiments A series of impromptu outdoor exhibitions and events in various Lithuanian towns and cities.

March 2015—Cemetery to Ghetto My last Performance Without an Audience was made into a short film.

September 2016—The Kaunas Requiem A week-long exhibition and live music recital inside an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas. Music from the project is here.

2018—Back to Shul Three very different exhibitions in Prienai, Kaunas and Vilnius. In partnership with the Lithuanian Jewish Community and others.

October 2018-April 2019—Lost & Found Yeshiva University Museum, New York. An article in Moment magazine is here. 

March-April 2024—A Window to the Future Three nights of projections in the windows of the former ORT Technicum building in Wilno/Vilnius. In collaboration with the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library of Lithuania. With Mark Adam Harold (see also here). A short description is here.