I have always been attracted by a peculiar phenomenon of late socialism, large garage areas, called ‘garage towns’ in Lithuanian. Spanning extensive areas, these garages were part of the social fabric. For example, my classmate’s father used to park his Soviet Lada in his garage, but the garage was so far away that he still had to take a trolleybus to get home. Clearly, such garages were not just a matter of convenience, but rather homes for cars, which in turn were not so much a means of transport, but rather mechanical pets, that required time, attention and an array of extraordinary tools to fix them.
Thinking that this late Soviet lifestyle had completely disappeared in today’s Lithuania, on a recent trip to the IKEA that has recently opened up on the edge of Vilnius, I was surprised to see a sprawling garage town nearby.
There I stood on Prusu Street with 500 garage doors were staring at me, a relic from the past inviting me to engage with a world in which there was no IKEA, no conspicuous consumption, and cars broke down. I accepted their challenge.
This is how this series of photographs of garage doors was born.
