Curriculum Vitae
Richard Antony Schofield
Arriving in Lithuania from England in June 2001, for the last decade, the lens-based artist, photo historian, curator, campaigner and 'imaginary composer' Richard Schofield has been exploring the often uncomfortable subject of prewar Lithuanian Jewish life and culture in his solo practice whilst simulatneously running the International Centre for Litvak Photography, a non-profit organisation that he founded in Vilnius in April 2015. Regularly working with individuals and organisations in Germany, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdon, the United States and various other countries around the world, Richard’s often unorthodox methods have led to some truly diverse and memorable work, both as an artist in his own right and as a contributor on larger international projects. The author of two published photography books, and currently in the early stages of writing his third, Richard, who moved to Žagarė in July 2023, has been held at gunpoint twice, and is the paternal grandson of the acclaimed pilot and author, Harry Methuen Schofield.
Professional Qualifications
Master of Arts (Distinction)
Photojournalism & Documentary Photography
London College of Communication/University of the Arts London
December 2009
During his two years of study and practice-based training in London and Lithuania, Richard began photographing subjects in a traditional style, including the partially sighted Lithuanian ceramic artist, Mindaugas Rutkauskas, before moving on to develop his own voice and style. From the second term onwards, Richard worked exclusively with a mobile phone, becoming the first person in the world to acquire a Master of Arts degree in photography using such a device. Subjects covered during this period included independence celebrations in Kosovo and, for his final degree project Daily Life Revisited. Richard, who's especially interested in reaching new and/or marginalised audiences, converted an empty shoe shop inside a Soviet-era shopping centre in Vilnius into a temporary gallery for his solo degree show.
Post-MA Highlights
In his documentary work, Richard has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Lithuania, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as both a practicing photographer and a curator. He also occasionally exhibits photographs in a range of unusual outdoor locations, including buildings, forests and lakes that all have a connection with the subject of Jewish memory. His projects as both a photojournalist and an artist (genres that often merge into one in his work) have appeared in print and online publications around the world, including the BBC and Black + White Photography magazine in the United Kingdom, the Jerusalem Report in Israel and the New York Times in the United States. His often unconventional working methods, and the cultural significance of his work, sometimes means that Richard becomes the subject of the news himself.
2010
Richard participated in Beyond Borders, a month-long group degree show with 14 other recently graduated photographers at the Printspace gallery in Hoxton in East London, for which he also co-wrote the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Several of Richard's exhibition prints were bought by private collectors, and, on the same day that the exhibition opened, he was commissioned by Apa Publications, the London-based publishers of the critically acclaimed Berlitz and Insight guides, to photograph everyday life in Russia where he spent six weeks travelling in August/September and December/January, producing 1,500 images for the client (see the Black + White Photography link, above). Richard’s mobile phone projects won critical acclaim with the Berlin-based Eye'em (today known as EyeEm) organisation. Four of his Nokumentary™ (see below) photographs subsequently appeared in Eye’em’s first ever group exhibition in Berlin in June, as well as in the book that accompanied the show. As part of his occasional Snapshot Citizens project, Richard gave a presentation on the importance of amateur and family photography in correcting distorted narratives in authoritarian societies at that year's TEDx event in Vilnius in December.
2011
With funding from the British Embassy in Vilnius, Richard started work in Kaunas on Pavojinga Teritorija (see below), which at the time was planned as a one-off Lithuanian Jewish-related project, but that would go on trigger the first of two experiences that would completely transform the nature of his professional working practice. Richard was also the Guest of Honour at biennial Panevežys International Photography Festival, Žmogus ir Miestas and continued to research and collect images for his Snapshot Citizens project. Throughout the year, Richard made several visits to Visaginas to photograph the inhabitants of the city for his long-term project, Half Life.
2012
Richard continued working on Snapshot Citizens and Half Life. In the autumn, he curated a Snapshot Citizens exhibition featuring unique, never- before-seen amateur and family photographs from the Soviet Union at the Brighton Photo Fringe festival. A few weeks later, with funding from the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, eight large-scale black and white prints and other images from his Half Life project were exhibited at the Vartai gallery in Vilnius. The project and exhibition were also featured in the Nr.3 (28) issue of Literatūra ir Menas.
2013
Richard’s second and last (at least for the foreseeable future) Snapshot Citizens exhibition was commissioned by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), and took place at BASEES’ Annual Congress at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam College in April. Whilst photographing a 1935 Lithuanian telephone directory at the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas in September for the Pavojinga Teritorija project, Richard accidentally discovered a collection of 113 family photographs that once belonged to an unknown Jewish family from the city who perished during the Holocaust. The project that grew out of the discovery would become known as Lost & Found, a major memory, research, exhibition and music project that has become Richard’s primary obsession (see below). Pavojinga Teritorija was featured in dayfour/ten, a limited edition book published by Fiona Hayes, Art Director at Condé Nast International.
2014
Refining the idea behind Snapshot Citizens, Richard began working on The Fourth Room, a family photography-based project that challenges the myth that Jewish life and culture in Lithuania ended with the Holocaust, proving through interviews and photographic evidence that the surviving generation of post-war Litvaks found it impossible to rebuild their prewar lives as a direct consequence of the repressive Soviet system. At the time of writing, The Fourth Room is on hold due to other commitments, although it’s hoped that Richard will start working on the project again in the future (click here to view a copy of the experimental scrapbook that Richard published as part of the project). Frustrated with the lack of opportunities to show work in Kaunas, Richard spent a large part of the year creating work that he displayed outdoors in the form of ‘performances without an audience’, including hanging photographs in forests (the so-called Garden of Earthly Delights project, see above) and throwing bottles filled with photographs of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors into lakes and rivers (see Cemetery to Ghetto, and Cemetery to Sukkot). On October 28, Richard photographed the bizarre reburial of an unknown number of Jews that were murdered at the Sevent Fort during the summer of 1941. The event, which involved a lot of arguing and animosity between various groups that were all supposed to be on the same side of history, was one of the key inspirations behind Richard's decision to set up the independently minded International Centre for Litvak Photography six months later.
2015
Pavojinga Teritorija came to an end in March with a combined exhibition and public event attended by school pupils and elderly Kaunas Jews at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, the first privately organised exhibition at the site in its 60-year history. As well as funding from the British Embassy in Vilnius, Pavojinga Teritorija was financially supported by donations from a large group of friends and supporters. In the same month, Richard published his first e-book, Nokumentary™, with the New York publishing house Dutch Kills Press. For his work promoting the protection of Lithuanian Jewish cultural heritage, Richard was one of four nominees for the annual Sugihara Diplomats for Life Citizen of Tolerance award. Other highlights included Richard’s founding of the International Centre for Litvak Photography, originally an official Lithuanian VšĮ that at the time of writing is in the process of becoming a UK-based charity. During the summer, Richard won the ‘Cultural Leap’ category for a photograph taken in Kaunas’ Old Jewish Cemetery in a competition organised by the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
2016
After a long international social media campaign, the names and identities of the unknown Jewish family from Kaunas who perished during the Holocaust whose 113 photographs Richard discovered in 2013 were finally established. In response, Richard commissioned a unique piece of memorial music from the Ukrainian composer Anton Dehtiarov, raised almost €10,000 from various sources, and in September rented an abandoned former synagogue in Kaunas where the music was performed over six days alongside an installation of photographic projections and a small exhibition of prints. At the end of the year, the photographs were given to surviving members of the family in New York. With a small donation from the Canadian Embassy in Vilnius, Richard commissioned a related CD, The Aniushka Variations.
2017
In January, Richard initiated Fifty Schools, a two-year education project with funding from the Good Will Foundation in Vilnius, taking the Lost & Found story to high schools all over Lithuania. He made two appearances on LRT (one feature, and one early morning piece on Labas Rytas Lietuva), and spent 12 days in August hitchhiking and travelling by public transport around Lithuania, photographing and writing about the country’s surviving former synagogues.
2018
Richard’s 12-day journey in 2017 was transformed into three exhibitions in 2018, one at the Ars Et Mundus gallery in Kaunas, one at the Prienų Kultūros ir Laisvalaikio Centras and the last one, in cooperation with the Lithuanian Jewish Community on the annual European Day of Jewish Culture, at the abandoned former Zavl’s Kloyz in Vilnius. Richard’s work was also included in the 2018 Vilnius Photo Circle festival in Vilnius. In October, Richard travelled to New York for the opening of the first major Lost & Found exhibition, which ran for seven months at the city’s Yeshiva University Museum and that Richard co-curated with the museum’s director, Jacob Wisse.
2019
Richard concluded a two-year project with partner organisations in Latvia and Sweden with a six-day travelling summer school. The project was funded by Nordplus, who subsequent funded us again to expand the project in 2022. After presenting the Lost & Found project to a group of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian museum curators at the National Library of Lithuania in September, Richard was invited to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, which he visited in October to discuss future photography projects (see The Untitled Catalogue, below). In December, Richard hosted a group of young artists and photographers from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Spain and Egypt at an EU Europe For Citizens-funded event at the Art Department at VDU on the subject of art and the Holocaust, where he spoke in detail about the role of photography and memory in authoritarian societies.
2020
During the first Coronavirus lockdown, Richard took on the imaginary persona of the 'enigmatic English composer', Albert Hall, producing a range musical pieces and sound experiments using sampled recordings of broken window glass and other structural elements of former Jewish buildings in Lithuania and other countries around Europe. Known collectively as The Kristalltag Suite, he's currently developing a new piece that will be performed as part of his All That Remains project at the Vyšnių Festivalis in Žagarė in July 2024. In September, Richard was invited to represent Lithuania at the United Nations at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where it was planned to show the Lost & Found exhibition in collaboration with the Yeshiva University Museum in New York, and that was unfortunately cancelled due to the coronavirus epidemic. In the autumn, Richard was awarded a small grant from the Lithuanian Council for Culture to carry out some original research that would completely redefine the aims and direction of the International Centre for Litvak Photography.
2021
Richard spent the year researching the surviving prewar Lithuanian Jewish photographs that are held in Lithuanian State institutions, visiting several museums, archives and libraries around the country and developing a public access programme aimed at working with these institutions to make the images more easily available to artists, historians and young people. He also made his first visit to the German spa town of Bad Kissingen, where he's currently working with the local Jewish museum in the town on a project that's due to begin with an exhibition in 2024.
2022
With support from the Lithuanian Embassy in Tel Aviv, Richard visited Israel for the second time, spending time doing original research at four Israeli institutions that hold prewar Lithuanian Jewish photographs in their collections. With the collaboration of the National Museum of Lithuania and other partners, in November Richard quietly launched The Useless Archive.
2023
The International Centre for Litvak Photography announced its new Mission. The previous two years' research were consolidated into The Untitled Catalogue. In March/April, Richard and his occasional collaborator and technical consultant Mark Adam Harold worked together on a project with the Judaica Research Centre at the National Library of Lithuania, producing a series of nighttime projections in the windows of the former ORT Technikum building in the centre of Vilnius as part of a larger exhibition at the library. In May, Richard gave a presentation at the Kaunas Photography Gallery, with whom he co-submitted an application to the United States Embassy Small Grants Program to produce the first (beta) version of The Untitled Catalogue. At the time of writing, Richard and the gallery are waiting to find out if their application was successful. In July, Richard bought an apartment in a former Jewish house in Žagarė. At the time of writing, the International Centre for Litvak Photography is in the process of becoming a UK-based charity, with a main office in England and a research office in Žagarė. As part of his ongoing plans to mark a clearer delineation between his role as the director at the International Centre for Litvak Photography and his work as an independent artist, on September 19, Richard started the process of becoming a member of the Lietuvos Fotomenininkų Sąjunga.
Contact
Avižonio 5-1
84323
Žagarė
Lithuania
Tel. LT +37063016686
Tel. UK +447760920661
General Information
Date of Birth September 2, 1964
Place of Birth Crawley, England
Sex/Gender Male
Citizenship UK
Official Residence Republic of Lithuania
Asmens Kodas 36409021300
References
Gintaras Česonis
Director, Kaunas Photography Gallery
Tel. +37068223806
gintaras@kaunasgallery.lt
Svaigedas Stoškus
Head, Kaunas office of the Department of Cultural Heritage under the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture
Tel. +37061211875
svaigedas.stoskus@kpd.lt
David G. Roskies
Sol and Evelyn Henkind Chair in Yiddish Literature and Culture, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, USA
Tel. +16465151984
david.roskies@gmail.com