ENIt is hard to imagine Lithuania without photography. It is harder still to say how the almost cultic obsession with the medium came to exist in somewhere so far from Paris, London, or Vienna. Those capitals of modernity, in which photography advanced exponentially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were the antitheses of this remote country on the distant edge of Europe, ravaged by wars, uprisings, and political unrest. When Daguerre unveiled his invention in the summer of 1839, Lithuania was not even on the map of Europe, and only the oldest generation could remember the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. [Extract, p. 15]