Born in 1981, Jovita Valaityte grew up during the Communist era in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city. Just graduated in photography from Westminster University, she speaks to David Land about her determination to succeed as a UK-based freelance.

Jovita Valaityte, 27, came to the UK from Lithuania in 2001, working in food factories around King’s Lynn, before commencing a degree in photography at Westminster University. “I didn’t have a camera when I was a child”, she says, “but my mother worked as a photographer for a short time before she became a businesswoman. She used to go abroad, and would bring back dolls for my sister and me. No one else had these dolls, and it was a big thing, because Lithuania was a Communist country back then.

“I feel a nostalgia for my past, even if Lithuania was then a part of the Soviet Union. I had a very different childhood to those children who are growing up now: Russian fairy tales are imprinted in my memory.

“My original intention was to stay for only a short while in the UK, just to earn enough money to go to Italy, where I was told I could get work as a model. I learned English at school in Lithuania. The first year I was here, my English didn’t improve much - I just learned Russian! - because that’s what you needed in the food factories around King’s Lynn that I was working in. The people there are from Poland, Russia and The Ukraine, and they all speak Russian.

“I went to college, and studied psychology, sociology and English literature. By this time, I realised I didn’t want to be a model, and that I was excited by photography. It’s the mystery that first attracted me, and I also wanted to have a creative job where I could express myself.

“I read about Westminster University in the library in King’s Lynn, and found out that it was the first to teach photography courses in Europe and that it had a strong reputation. I applied, but I had no portfolio. I just took my camera out with me and walked around the city, photographing people on the street, in the park: portraits, a bit of landscape.

“I came to London to start to course. I got a student loan for the largest amount you can, which is about £7000 a year, which was really helpful, and I didn’t have to pay too much rent, so it was just about enough to support myself.

“So now I’m about £18,000 in debt, but I only have to pay it back when I’m earning above £15,000 a year, so I felt confident to use the money. And the interest rate is very low – it’s I not like having a credit card bill. It doesn’t worry me at all. If I don’t get a job or something happens, no one is going to be knocking on my door for the money.

“I have a very positive view of student loans, because in Lithuania we get student loans of £500 - and how much can you do with that? For that money, people buy a ticket for England or somewhere else in Europe, to earn some money and have that as a bit of support for the next year while studying. I had a great time on my degree, because I didn’t have to work to support myself, so I had more time to concentrate on photography.

“I did some modelling for a hairdresser at the Vidal Sassoon Academy, and through that I found out about Spring photographic studios near Kentish Town, and started assisting there. I would carry the coffee tray, and try to see how everything worked. I’d see all these cameras connected to computers and think, ‘Can you believe it? You can have a cameraconnected to three screens!’ I saw shoots for Vogue magazine, Stella McCartney’s collection being shot, advertising shoots, and I assisted Australian photographer Richard Nolan-Neylan.

“Early on, I received the important advice with regard to make-up, hair, styling, and the whole concept of a fashion photo shoot, that ‘less is always more’, and I learned that it is wise to use models from model agencies rather than friends.

“In the beginning, it was not easy to get new faces from model agencies, but as my work progressed, I found the agencies were much more interested to work with me. But finding a stylist was always difficult, so I used fashion students’ final collections.

“Being at both the university and the studio meant I was doing 16 hour days, so after about a year I stopped working at the studio to concentrate on my studies.

“I did a bit of darkroom work on the first year of the course, which was tricky with all of us working together in the darkroom. With film, you spend all day on one picture, but with digital you get it straight away. Because I bought a digital camera, I didn’t use the university’s medium format cameras much, but film is excellent, and the images you get from it are not like digital.

“In our second year, part of the course was that we had to get work experience, or have work published or exhibited. I approached the Lithuanian Embassy, and was given space and some financial support to curate an exhibition. I invited international photographers and videographers based in London, and we had an exhibition called Time Fractions, which interpreted the theme of time through changing worlds and cultures.

“In our third year, we learnt about business practice. We had to make up our portfolios, and photographers were invited to share their experiences. I went to AOP talks, where working photographers would discuss their practices, and assistants would talk about the requirements of the job.

“I worked with Eleni Stefanou, a BA in media and communication student at Goldsmith University, who started Contra magazine, where students can showcase their work. I did a project with her on a burlesque dancer, an image from which was used in Time Out magazine, and is due to be published in the Greek national newspaper Kathimerini.

“I wanted my final project to be very different from anything I had done over the past three years, which was mostly fashion, using a digital camera and flash. I wanted to give myself a challenge.

“My final project involved drag queens dressed as angels. I’d wanted to do a project on angels for a while. I like Renaissance imagery, and I’d been thinking about how to bring it into photography. The angel is traditionally the messenger of god. There’s also the concept of the guardian angel, and that angels are watching people and recording our deeds.

“I wanted something quite abstract that didn’t relate to a particular time. I researched, and found out that angels were painted with armour that sometimes had precious jewellery on it, like the garlands of emperors.

“I had to borrow money to get the budget together for the final project shoot. It cost about £200 for costumes, £200 for lighting, £200 for location hire, £200 for Polaroids, and £400 for printing: about £1200 in total. I shot the project on a large format camera, using HMI lighting because it’s continuous. I only had one day to shoot it, because it would have been too expensive to do more days.

“I’d found the location previously, when I was looking for somewhere to do a fashion test shoot. I was looking through a window into an interesting house near Brick Lane, when the man who lived there came home. We got talking, and he invited me in to have a look around. I learned that he’d hired out the house to Mario Testino and to film companies. It had a 200-year-old interior, with about eight or 10 rooms.

“I had a good response to my project at the graduation show. Lots of people said that it didn’t look like student work. Someone said that the work doesn’t reflect my nationality. But I think it does, only in a subtle way. The idea of using drag queens was that, while in London we tolerate each others’ differences quite well, in Lithuania there tends to be less tolerance toward sexual minorities, so we have a drag queen as an angel. Instead of being judged, he is the one who is going to record your thoughts and actions, and so the situation is reversed.

“Someone also said they imagined that a male photographer had taken these images. In a way I am glad to hear that. It means that my work is subtle. However, my next project may reflect more on my gender, as I have recently been inspired by the painter Leonora Carrington, who portrayed women as goddesses living in confines of patriarchal culture!

“It’s a bit worrying after university, wondering what to do next. I know it’ll take maybe a year or more to start getting somewhere. I’ll keep doing test shoots to make my portfolio stronger, and do some more assisting, approaching photographers that I really like.

“I was on holiday in Lithuania recently, and I went to the editors of a couple of magazines and showed my work. I was there for two weeks and in that time did three shoots, but the money wasn’t good. I have no plans to go back permanently: there’s more work in London, more of a place for your creativity, and a greater variety of photographers working.”

www.jovitaphotography.com