“The local disco is where you go to get drunk, make out, dance and sometimes fight,” says photographer Andrew Miksys who spent 10 years photographing village discos in Lithuania. His photos peer into a desperate tenderness, a precious sort of gaudiness and a sense of danger. As the Lithuanian youth flees the countryside to bigger cities, to Western Europe and to the US, but the scene lives on. In a manner of speaking.
Miksys would find these places at the at ends of lonely back roads and inside dilapidated Soviet-era cultural centers. He tells L1ghtB1tes:
Sometimes I would rummage around the back rooms and find broken Lenin paintings, Soviet movie posters, gas masks and other remnants of the Soviet Union. I was quite fascinated by all this debris of a dead empire. It seemed like a perfect backdrop to make a series of photographs about young people in Lithuania, a crumbling past and the uncertain future of a new generation together in one room.
T
he DISKO book is available for purchase. (Photos Courtesy Andrew Miksys)
