Virgilijus Šonta

Born on 16 February 1952 in Panevėžys, Lithuania; died on 28 July 1992 in Vilnius, Lithuania.
From 1959 to 1970, he attended secondary school. In 1976, he graduated from the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute, earning a degree in engineering. The same year, he began working at the Kaunas branch of the Lithuanian Society of Photographic Art.
Since 1981, he worked as a freelance photographer. In 1985, he returned to the Lithuanian Society of Photographic Artin Vilnius.
His work became a major driving force behind the emergence of a new approach to artistic photography in Lithuania during the 1980s, significantly influencing the development of contemporary Lithuanian photography.
Selected series:
• Lithuanian Landscape (1974–1979)
• Northern Stones (1977–1979)
• Flight (1977–1979)
• Objects and Forms (1978–1983)
• Folk Artists (1979)
• School Is My Home (1980–1983)
• Flight (1984)
• Western America (1988–1990)
• Premonition of Evening (1990)
His photographs are held in the collections of the Lithuanian Photographers' Association (Vilnius, Lithuania), the Museum of Photography (Šiauliai, Lithuania), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, France), the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), and the International Center of Photography (New York, USA).