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Robert LaVigne was an American painter, illustrator and designer. He was associated with the Beat Generation in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also the painter of the portrait of Allen Ginsberg. According to Ginsberg, LaVigne had helped give birth to the Beat Generation, because his roomy art house in San Francisco was the place for gathering wild and unclothed “bohemians.” Like Ginsberg, LaVigne focused on decay and death in his work. According to LaVigne, these themes reflected the angst of the young generation in the Atomic Age, which “gave the lie to permanence.”

Karl Laantee was an émigré Estonian political activist, theologian and announcer with Western propaganda radio during the 1980s. He went to the West during the Second World War, where he studied theology and politology at several universities. He worked as a Lutheran pastor in Argentina, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. Laantee was active in Estonian communities abroad. He took an active part in major Estonian events, like Worldwide Estonian Days, or celebrating Independence Day of the Republic of Estonia. He was also active in Estonian émigré politics. For example, he was vice-chairman of the Baltic Appeal to the United Nations in 1966. During the 1980s, he became known in Estonia as an announcer with the Voice of America. The radio station provided the people of Soviet Estonia with an alternative source of information. He returned to Estonia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and taught at the University of Tartu.

Mart Laar (b. 1960) is an Estonian historian and politician. He was prime minister of Estonia in 1992–1994 and 1999–2002. As a historian, he has written a large number of books about Estonian history (some have also been published in English, Russian, German and Finnish), and several textbooks. 
He studied history at the Tartu State University in the early 1980s, and was an initiator and active member of the Noor-Tartu (Young-Tartu) student movement. He had the initial idea for a movement to arrange the city space. He got it from Tallinn, where a similar movement of school students was active. 

László Lajtha was born in Budapest (Hungary), on 30 June 1892. He was a composer, ethnomusicologist, and conductor.

His parents were Ida Wiesel and Pál Lajtha.

As a child, he was quite impressed by Transylvanian folk music. He also liked French music, and his favorite composer was Claude Debussy.

Lajtha studied composition, piano, and music at the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he earned his degree in 1913. He also studied in Leipzig, Geneva, and Paris, where he was a pupil of the famous French composer, Vincent d’Indy. Lajtha began collecting folk music and folk songs in 1910, and he joined the great movement launched by Béla Bartók. In 1913, he started work as a civil servant at the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. That same year, his first work, D’un cahier d’esquisses (From a Musician’s Sketchbook), appeared in print. News of this work spread rapidly, and Lajtha became famous as an avantgarde musician. Two other piano pieces, The Sonata and Tales, were published in 1914 and 1915. Lajtha’s musical career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, which also forced him to break with his French connections. In 1919, he became a professor of composition and chamber music at the National Conservatory of Music in Budapest. In 1928, he became an active member of the International Commission for Popular Arts and Traditions, and two years later he was elected as the president of the Music Department of the commission. Between 1928 and 1939, he became well known throughout Europe, where his chamber music and symphonic works were played. His ties with France were strong, and he made several friends among prominent French composers (Ravel, Roussel, Ibert, Rivier, and Barraud). During this successful period, he became an honored member of the École de Paris, but the outbreak of World War II broke these ties (despite his efforts to keep in touch with his friends and, when possible, to leave Hungary for Paris). In 1947–48, he spent a year in London working with T. S. Eliot on the score for the film Murder in the Cathedral, an adaptation of one of Eliot’s works. Lajtha returned to Hungary in 1948, and he became involved in the resistance against the new political regime. Although he was a world-famous composer, Lajtha was denied a passport at home and was thereby forced to remain in Hungary. The new political regime felt threatened by his fame, and it hindered his career to the point that he was only allowed to collect folk music and songs. He received the most prestigious state award, the Kossuth Prize, in 1951. He donated the prize money to the poor. In the 1950s, following the ban on religious practice, he wrote symphonies (e.g. Op. 63-as VII.) and masses, and he composed his Magnificat in 1954 and wrote Marian anthems in 1958. He began collaborating with Margit Tóth and Zsuzsanna Erdélyi in 1953. Together, they collected folk songs, folk music, and archaic prayers in Transdanubia (the western part of Hungary). They referred to themselves as “Noah’s Ark.” In 1955, Lajtha, as the only Hungarian composer, was elected as a corresponding member of the Institut de France (Académie des Beaux-Arts). In 1962, he was finally allowed to travel to France.

László Lajtha was married to Róza Hollós. They had two sons.

Menyhért Lakatos (1926–2007) was a Hungarian Roma writer. Until 1954, he studied at the people’s college of Nagykőrös. In 1954–1955, he was a head of a department at the Committee of the Nagykőrös District. From 1955 until 1962, he was a technical engineer in Szarvas and Nagykőrös. From 1964 to 1969, he was a director at a brick factory. Between 1969 and 1975, he participated in research projects on Roma people which were done at the Sociological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1973, he began to work as a freelance writer. In 1986, he founded the Cultural Association of Roma. In 1988, he became the president of the Cultural Association of Roma in Hungary. He was a member of the presidency of the Hungarian Theatre Company. In the 1994 parliamentary elections, he was a candidate of the Independent Small Holders Party.

Pavel Landovský was a Czech actor, playwriter and signatory of Charter 77. After an unsuccessful period at the Academy of Mechanical Engineering, he decided to devote himself to the theatre. At first, he worked in the district theatres in Šumperk, Klatovy and Pardubice. Later, from 1965–1976, he became one of the leading figures of the Prague Drama Club (Činoherní klub). He wanted to study drama at the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), however, he was never admitted. The end of his official acting career in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia is linked to his critical approach to the regime. Landovský’s critical attitude was confirmed by his signature of Charter 77. Under pressure from the police authorities, and after several short-term prison sentences, he decided to emigrate from Czechoslovakia to neighbouring Austria in 1978. He successfully performed there as an actor. From 1982–1996 he was engaged at the Vienna Burgtheater. He returned to the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s.

Pavel Landovský was also involved in the literary side of the theatre, writing several plays. When he was still allowed to officially act, the plays Hodinový hoteliér (1969) and Případ pro venkovského policajta (1972) were performed. During “Normalization”, he produced several radio plays under the names of other authors (e. g. Karel Steigerwald). His plays were also published in samizdat volumes. Typical features of Landovský’s work are farces emerging from trivial, everyday situations, his distinctive language and slightly vulgar humour.

Jonas Lankutis, a researcher of Lithuanian literature and critic, graduated from Vilnius University in 1953, and in 1956 he started to work at the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature. In 1984, Lankutis was appointed director of the institute. (He was director until 1992.) He is the author of a book about the work of Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas. (First published in 1961, the third edition came out in 1986.) During the writing process, he often communicated with Mykolaitis-Putinas. In 1979, Lankutis presented his correspondence with Mykolaitis-Putinas to the Manuscript Section of the library of the Institute of Lithuanian Language and Literature.

Leonhard Lapin is an Estonian architect, artist and poet. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts as an architect in 1971. He was active in the avant-garde from the 1960s. Since the avant-garde was prohibited during the Soviet period, he could not find work as an architect, nor exhibit his artwork officially. He and like-minded artists organised semi-legal or illegal exhibitions. He was also active in the 1970s, editing manuscript magazines and creating texts and illustrations. Some of his work was shown outside the Soviet Union in Western countries in the 1970s, and it was highly praised. Since 1990, he has been a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, and since 1995 he has been a professor.

Emese Kinga Latkóczy-Osváths’ grandparents were displaced members of a family belonging to the nobility originating from Slovakia and having several ties to the Smallholders Party. The other branch of the family participated in the 1956 revolution and suffered persecution afterward. Emese Latkóczy was born in Toronto in 1961. Like other members of the CHRR, she grew up within the large and lively Hungarian community, whose popular activities at the time included the Hungarian weekend school and Hungarian scouting groups. The family moved to New York in 1973, where her parents acquired a travel agency. She met László Hámos, one of the founders of CHRR, in the framework of the Hungarian scouting organization. She became a professional actress very early and was admitted to New York Film Academy at the faculty of acting. She graduated as a film director. She spent her compulsory high school volunteer period in 1977 –1978 at CHRR, thus supporting the organization from a very early period. She worked in the film industry, with which she became disillusioned at an early stage, while at the same time growing increasingly committed to working for the human rights of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe. Later, she became chief executive of the HHRF and then head of the Budapest office. She is currently director of the HHRF.

Gheorghe Leahu was born on 10 May 1932 in Chişinău (also known as Kishinev, today in the Republic of Moldova) into a family belonging to the economic and political elite of Bessarabia, then part of the Kingdom of Romania. As a result of the Soviet ultimatum sent to the Romanian government on 26 June 1940, which called for the surrender of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina under the threat of Soviet military invasion, the Romanian army and administration left the province. Before the Soviet troops entered Chişinău at the end of June 1940, Gheorghe Leahu and his parents moved to Bucharest. According to Leahu’s account, his grandparents, who remained in Chişinău, were arrested and executed by the Soviet troops as part of extensive repressive measures which targeted the elite of the province. In 1944, his father was wounded on the battlefield and transported to a hospital in Făgăraş, a small city in the south of Transylvania, near the mountains of the same name. Gheorghe Leahu, along with his mother and sister, moved from Bucharest to Făgăraş to take care of his wounded father. Subsequently, the Leahu family lived for several years in Făgăraş. After he graduated from high school in Făgăraş, Leahu attended the architecture courses of the Ion Mincu Architecture Institute in Bucharest between 1951 and 1957. There he had the opportunity to study under teachers who had had a Western education, and had been architects in interwar Romania, such as Duiliu Marcu, Octav Doicescu, and George Simotta. They instilled in him a respect for architectural heritage which would mark his entire activity.
After finishing his studies, he worked in the period from 1957 to 1991 as architect at the Bucharest Project Institute (Institutul Proiect Bucureşti), which was responsible for carrying out urban planning and architectural projects in the Romanian capital, and was in charge of designing the contemporary emblematic buildings of Bucharest in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Unirea department store. In 1984, as an employee of the Bucharest Project Institute, he was charged with coordinating the architectural planning for the new building of the Bucharest Court of Law, which was to be situated, according to Ceauşescu’s instructions, on the site of the Văcăreşti Monastery, an important historic monument dating from the eighteenth century. Leahu and the team of architects he coordinated came up with twelve different architectural solutions which would have allowed the court of law to be built while at the same time preserving most of the site of the Văcăreşti Monastery. After two years of protracted debates, the authorities decided in 1986 to completely destroy the monument in order to make room for the new construction, rejecting all of the alternative proposals offered by Leahu’s team to save the monument. The very fact that Leahu received the task of coordinating the design of the new court of law in the Romanian capital suggests that he was accepted as a competent professional by the communist authorities, and that his initiatives to promote architectural heritage were tolerated, although not approved of.
In the context of the limitations and stress of the professional environment, caused by the interference of those in political power, one of Leahu’s means of escape was to paint watercolours. He started painting watercolours when he was in high school. In the 1980s, given the frustration caused by the degradation of working conditions for architects, who turned themselves into mere witnesses to the demolition of numerous historical monuments without attempting to protest, Leahu started his own silent act of cultural opposition by painting watercolours as a way of escaping the gloomy atmosphere of everyday life. He painted mostly old streets and buildings in Bucharest and other Romanian cities. His watercolours represent a source of information for large areas of the Romanian capital, which were destroyed in the 1980s in the restructuring of Bucharest, a process legitimised by the official discourse concerning the “urban systematisation” of the capital, which presented the demolitions as a necessary step in modernising the city. The watercolours represent an alternative memory to the official discourse of the time, which attempted to limit the protection and promotion of the city’s architectural heritage, and especially of the city’s old churches. A series of watercolours representing urban landscapes in the old centre of Bucharest were gathered by Leahu in an album entitled Bucureşti – arhitectură şi culoare (Bucharest – architecture and colour) and sent for publication in 1986 to the Sport Turism Publishing House. Initially, the album was approved by the censors and was published in 1988, probably due to a lapse of censorship activity, but, because it contained reproductions of watercolours representing old churches, it was withdrawn from sale and all but a few copies were destroyed.
Leahu kept a secret diary between 1985 and 1989, which he hid in his garage. The years discussed in the diary were characterised by a drastic rationing of basic products, as well as by a more repressive political regime, an intensification of censorship and propaganda, especially in the form of Ceauşescu’s personality cult. In his diary, Leahu harshly criticised Ceauşescu’s regime and its policies, which turned everyday life into a desperate struggle for food or other consumer goods, and professional activity into a long line of humiliations.
After 1989, Leahu exhibited his watercolours in Romania and abroad (New York – 1992, Vienna – 1994, Chicago – 1995, Paris – 2001, Venice – 2002). He also published a series of albums containing selections of reproductions of his watercolours, such as: Bucureştiul dispărut (Lost Bucharest, 1995), Distrugerea Mănăstirii Văcăreşti (The Destruction of the Văcăreşti Monastery, 1997), Bucureşti – portretul unui oraş (Bucharest – Portrait of a City, 1999). In 2005, he published his secret diary from the 1980s, under the title: Arhitect în „Epoca de Aur” (Architect in the “Golden Age”). The Romanian Post Office issued a series of stamps reproducing Leahu’s watercolours, which illustrates the manner in which his work marked the visual culture of post-communist Romania. As a sign of appreciation for his entire activity, Leahu was included in various professional organisations, such as the National Commission for Historic Monuments and the leading structures of the Union of Architects of Romania. In 2004, he was decorated by the President of Romania with the Order of Cultural Merit, rank of Commander, for his contribution to promoting Romanian culture.

Jiří Lederer was born on July 15, 1922 in Kvasiny near Rychnov nad Kněžnou. In Rychnov he later studied at grammar school. During the war, he was completely engaged to work in Wroclaw, to where he had fled and was hiding in his home region by the end of the war. After the war he studied philosophy and politics at the Political and Social College and at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University in Prague. From 1948 to 1949 he studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

After the war he published in the Social Democratic Letters, was an activist in the radical left-wing of the socially democratic youth, and in 1948 participated in the merger of the CSSD (Czechoslovak Socialist Democratic Party) with the Communist Party, which he later left. In 1948 he became the editor of the World in Paintings. For his disagreement with the practice of the 1950s, expressed at the conference of the Czechoslovak Union of Journalists, he was expelled from the union and could not publish or perform any work on culture. From 1951 to1954 he had to work in Ostrava's mines of ČKD.

Later, he was given amnesty and became the editor of the World of Soviets, and in 1956, Evening Prague, from where he was fired in 1958 for a positive review of the “Coward's” novel of Josef Škvorecký, which caused a great disturbance at the time. For a year he was unemployed before he was taken to the Technical News as an editor in 1959. Between 1962 and 1967, he was head of the Research Department of the Czechoslovak Radio, then the editor of the Weekly Literary Sheets (or Sheets) and the Reporter. Lederer was one of the most prominent publicists of the Prague Spring of 1968. In the 1970s, Lederer was deeply involved with the Czechoslovak dissent and was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. During the “Normalization Period” he was imprisoned several times (1970, 1972-1973 and 1977-1980), the first time for writing as a pretext for his attitude about the events of 1968 in Poland, the second time for the publication of interviews in Reporter with the writers who were not allowed to publish and for sending their works abroad. In 1980, he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany because of political pressure from the StB Asanace campaign. He continued his journalistic work in West Germany until he died at the age of 61 on 12 October 12 1983 in Birnbach, Bavaria.

He published several journalistic essays and books of essays (České Rozhovory, Cologne 1979; Když se řekne Voskovec – Když se řekne Werich, 1982, Mé Polsko, 1982) by samizdat and abroad while in exile; posthumously his book Jan Palach: A Report on the Life, Action and Death of the Czech Student (Prague 1990) was published.

Elzbieta Lederer was born on 15 July 1922 in the Polish historical town of Lower Kazimierz. She studied philology. At the beginning of the 1960s in Poland, she met a distinguished personality of Czech journalism, Jiří Lederer. In 1967 they married and moved to Prague. She wrote in several prestigious Polish newspapers and translated materials. She also worked with the Polish Cultural and Information Center. Alongside her husband, she also took an active part in the social life and events that culminated in the Prague Spring. After the invasion of the allied troops into Czechoslovakia, like her husband, she was subjected to persecution. In the 1970s, Jiri Lederer strongly engaged in the Czechoslovak opposition. For this activity he was imprisoned several times, so his wife became part of the Czech dissent. Like her husband, Elzbieta Lederero signed Charter 77. In 1978, Ledererová was among the seventeen founding members of the VONS (Defense Committee of Unjustly Prosecuted). She was the only member who did not have Czechoslovak citizenship. After the release of her husband from prison, the family was assigned by the State Security to Asanace, a campaign set by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia to force out unwanted people, particularly those who had signed Charter 77. Under pressure and the threat that Elizbiter Lederer as a Polish citizen would not be able to extend her stay in Czechoslovakia, the family emigrated to West Germany. Jiří Lederer actively participated in the activities of exile but died in 1983. After 1989, Mrs. Lederero did not return to Poland but to Czechoslovakia. Elizbieta Ledererová received the Václav Benda Award in 2014, which is awarded by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. She died on 27 May 2017 and is buried with her husband in Bad Birnbach, Bavaria.

Hardijs Lediņš (1955-2004) was an iconic personality in the Latvian avant-garde of the 1970s and 1980s. While still at school, he created several hand-written samizdat magazines, together with his classmate Juris Boiko (1954-2002), influenced by Dadaism and the absurd. These publications attracted the attention of the KGB, and almost all the magazines were confiscated after it searched Lediņš' home. Nevertheless, he was able to enter the Riga Polytechnical Institute to study architecture in 1973. His friend Juris, whose parents were victims of political repression, was not so lucky. While student Lediņš started to organize experimental disco-lectures at the RPI Student Club. The first part would be a thematic lecture about architecture or contemporary music, but the second part consisted of listening to music and dancing. The discos were extremely popular, and tickets sold out in 15 minutes. Lediņš lectured on popular music, rock, and contemporary ‘serious’ music of the New Viennese School, Paul Hindemith, Charles Ives, John Cage, etc. The disco-lectures ended in 1977, when, after the Second Festival of Contemporary Music, the organization of which Lediņš also took part in, the director and the artistic director of the Student Club were dismissed. For some time, Lediņš continued the discos in Jūrmala and provincial towns. He also organized his home recording studio Seque, where he, Boiko, and the architect Imants Žodžiks recorded their own experimental music, inspired by art rock and the avant-garde. In 1981, together with the visual artist Leonards Laganovskis and some other friends, he started a new project, the Kosmoss discotheque, where mainly New Wave music was played, but it also became a place where Latvian alternative music was performed. The group ‘Dzeltenie pastnieki’ (The Yellow Postmen) played their first hits there, based on lyrics by Lediņš and Boiko. A new element was introduced: visual effects and multimedia experience. In 1983, Kosmoss was closed down by the authorities, due to its ‘ideologically and morally harmful character’. As an architect, Lediņš was interested mainly in the philosophy of architecture in its postmodernist expansion (the ideas of Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks), the living environment, and the perception of living and urban spaces. Architectural ideas were integrated into his art projects: actions, performances and videos made by the NSRD (Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings), which was first established in 1982 as an experimental music group, when Lediņš and Boiko were joined by the musician Inguna Černova. But later they gave this title to all the activities of their collective, which also included actions, performances, videos and multimedia art. Photographs from some actions were shown at exhibitions of work by young architects, and also at the exhibition ‘Vide, daba, cilvēks’ (Environment, Nature, Man) in 1984, the first exhibition where conceptual art was publicly shown. However, most of his activities were of an underground nature, and this was not only because the avant-garde art practized by the NSRD was not officially accepted, it was also a conceptual choice. For example, Walks to Bolderāja were considered by Lediņš as a private meditative practice. In the mid-1980s, Lediņš and Boiko created the independent artistic programme ‘Approximate Art’. With perestroika, the NSRD was able to popularize its art openly, the number of publications about the group increased significantly, and the NSRD participated in exhibitions. Lediņš and the NSRD received international recognition thanks to the exhibition ‘Riga-Latvian Avant-Garde’ in West Berlin, Kiel and Bremen in 1988 and 1989. The exhibition was a great success: it was the culmination of the NSRD’s activities, but also its end. From 1989, Juris Boiko and Hardijs Lediņš worked individually. Lediņš created the Approximate Art Agency with the aim of realizing a broad range of practical activities. However, its integration into international art proved to be more difficult than expected, and for several years Lediņš lived through a creative crisis. In the 1990s he started to experiment with electronic music. One of his last big projects was staging the opera ‘Rolstein on the Beach’ (an allusion to the opera ‘Einstein on the Beach’ by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson) with Kaspars Rolšteins in 1997.

Gabriella Lengyel (1948-) an activist of the Hungarian democratic opposition, sociologist, educator.

She was born in Budapest, his father was a radio mechanic had been running his own little shop, until it was ’nationalized’ by the Communist state. As a child she was a devoted member of the her school’s choir, and an extra for the National Theatre. In 1967 she started her studies at the Hungarian Actors Academy, but two years later she changed for studying history at Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest.

Through some friends she got in connection with the empirical research team of sociologist István Kemény and took part actively in the nationwide Roma survey from 1971, by visiting Gipsy families in the Trans-Danubian region. Inspirated by Kemény a year later she also started to study sociology at the university, as it was reintroduced legally in the curriculum of social sciences, and in the meantime she kept on being busy with her field researches. She received her MA degree in History in 1978 and in Sociology in 1981.

Gabriella remained a freelance sociologist up untill 1990, at the beginning to preserve her personal independence, and later because she failed to apply for state jobs, as a reknown activist of the opposition. During the 1980s she could not travel abroad either, as her claim for a passport was repeatedly refused by the police. In late 1979 she was one of the eight founding-members of SZETA, and the regular monthly meetings of activists for several years were held at her home in Miksa Déri street, in a workers’ district of Budapest. Apart from her sociological surveys and voluntary job done for SZETA she also took part in several activities of the dissident movement. She gave birth to her first child in 1984, and went on ’leave’ as an activist for a few years, but as the system was challenged by more and more radical changes, she herself reactivated. In 1987 she became a founding member, among others, of ’Asylum Committe’ a civilian organisation supported refugees fled from Ceausescu’s Romania, and was also an active organiser of the first independent Hungarian trade union, that of TDDSZ, ’Scientific Workers Democratic Union’ well before the political system changed.

Following 1990 she assisted her fiends became the member of Parieament Ottília Solt, and Gábor Havas to designe a new democratic social policy in Hungary. From 1993 she became one of the first educators of the newly established Social Worker Training School of John Wesley Theological College. After 1999 she returned to her field works as a freelance sociologist again, and conducted training courses of research methodology.

Eszter Leveleki was born in 1917. Her father was a factory director, and her mother worked as a teacher. She studied at the Szent Orsolya College, and in 1936 she started to work at the private kindergarten of Ms Márta Müller Nemes, who in the 1920s worked together with the Swiss psychiatrist Jean Piaget and gradually became one of the representatives of the reform pedagogy movement in Hungary. Leveleki also followed the pedagogical norms of Ferenc Mérei, who was an important figure in Hungarian social psychology. At the time, Waldorf and Montessori were the best-known alternative pedagogical methods.

Mirel Leventer (b. 25 December 1950, Bucharest) is a respected architect. He graduated from Ion-Luca Caragiale High School in 1969 and from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest (today the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism) in 1975. He has a rich professional experience, and has taken many professional development courses both in Romania and abroad. Between 1985 and 1993, he lived in Israel. At present he has dual Romanian and Israeli citizenship. His architectural work includes a number of major buildings, both in Romania and abroad, including a considerable number in Israel. He is a member of Club A in Bucharest and was the coordinator of its cine-club between 1970 and 1975, when he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture.

His interests include advertising, video production, mountaineering, travel, and film history. He continues to take pleasure in taking photographs. It is a passion of his that goes back almost half a century: “I’ve been taking photographs since high school, in fact since the eighth grade. So, in a way, I’ve almost always liked taking photographs. Indeed, when I was at high school I took part in many photographic exhibitions for pupils. There was also a photography club at high school. In those days, photography clubs were little amateur institutions, where we learned what to do with a camera. We had a coordinator, who in our case was our physics teacher, but the clubs had no special connection with school. A club like that encouraged us to develop a particular passion; I could say that this was where the ‘first seeds’ of a passion were sown” – the passion that would later give rise to the unique collection of photographs and films connected to Club A.