Antanas Jonas Miežanskas was born on 1 March 1938.
He became interested in photography as a teenager, when his uncle visited his home on a visit from Riga. He bought his first camera in 1952, at the age of 14, after selling a bag of nuts at the market. From then on, he was fully immersed in photography.
Since 1961, Mie˛anskas has been the chairman of the Tourist Club. He took part in many hikes and his personal archive contains many photos from the Urals, Eastern Siberia, Sayan, Khibiny, Tyumen, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Sakhalin, etc.
He worked as a film cameraman at Telefilm since 1966. He is known as a cameraman for the films "Death and the Cherry Tree", "Songs of the Village of Ziuri", "Trees and People", "The Ancient Wedding of Kupiškėnų". He also took photographs in between filming, which is why a large part of the archive consists of unique ethnographic material.
A. Mie˛anskas also contributed to the formation of the Lithuanian school of photography from the early 1960s onwards - his iconic photographs can already be found in the very first almanac "Lithuanian Photography" published in 1967. In addition to the well-known works of A. Sutkus, V. Lutkus and A. Macijauskas, his works also represented Lithuanian photography in the exhibition "9 Lithuanian Photographers" in Moscow in 1969 and in the exhibition "Local Genius. Classics of Lithuanian Photography". In recent years, as far as possible, he has continued to take an interest in the life of Lithuanian photography and has tried to participate in it.
Despite the subject matter, the photographer has been able to reveal the uniqueness of the subject while maintaining his own photographic style. Miežanos's photographs include portraits of strangers, tender and sensitive nudes, the unadorned but at the same time enchantingly beautiful everyday life of Lithuanian towns, and portraits of famous figures of art, culture and politics of the 1970s and 1980s.
Antanas Miežanskas was one of the first photographers in Soviet Lithuania to work with colour photography.
His solo exhibitions have been held in Lithuania on several occasions, and he has taken part in exhibitions with other photographers in the republics of the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Canada, Singapore, and the Scandinavian countries. He has received several awards for his photographs.
