CAMERA OBSCURA

Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish photographs provide a unique and irreplaceable record of a civilisation that no longer exists. Not unlike the diversity of men, women and children that made and owned them in the decades leading up to Nazi Germany's invasion of Lithuania on June 22, 1941, the vast majority of the more than 10 million Lithuanian Jewish photographs that existed in hundreds of thousands of homes, handbags, photography studios, photo albums, institutions, wallets, picture frames and scores of other locations in every Lithuanian shtot, stetl and dorf on the eve of Operation Barbarossa were either destroyed or otherwise displaced to destinations unknown during the three years of incomprehensible savagery that followed. Camera Obscura is an experimental online encyclopedia that investigates the fascinating history that led to this extraordinary episode of cultural destruction, whilst simultaneously publishing a wealth of information about the few thousand images that managed to survive the carnage, and that are today held among the various collections of Lithuanian museums, archives and libraries.