“Without Exams or the Ministry of Information”: Photographer Siarhei Mikhalenka Opens Publishing House in Lithuania
Reform.news Editorial Team · 12 October 2026, 16:08
https://reform.news/en/without-exams-or-the-ministry-of-information-photographer-siarhei-mikhalenka-opens-publishing-house-in-lithuania/Belarusian photographer and curator Siarhei Mikhalenka (Sergejus Michalenko) has registered a new publishing house in Lithuania. It will publish books and albums by Belarusian photographers, with its first release set to be a collection of winners of the PhotoArtDoc festival.
Mikhalenka announced the launch of the publishing house on social media, highlighting how straightforward the procedure is in the EU compared with Belarus’s bureaucratic system.
“We registered a publishing house in Lithuania today in less than 24 hours. I filled everything out in 20 minutes in the evening, and by 10 a.m. I had already received a registration notification and my first ISBN,” the photographer shared.
He compared this experience with the procedure in Belarus, where opening a publishing house requires state registration with the Ministry of Information, the submission of a large set of documents and passing an exam before a qualification commission: “The review period is one month, and there is no guarantee that the application will be approved.”
“It’s great that Lithuania, like many European countries, follows this principle: the state should not decide in advance who deserves to publish books. Accountability comes into play when specific violations occur, while quality is assessed by the market and society,” Mikhalenka noted.
The founder of the initiative stressed that the new publishing house’s main goal is to support Belarusian authors: “That’s it — now we’ll be publishing books by Belarusian photographers.”
The new publishing house’s first project will be the book “PhotoArtDoc 2026. Award-Winning Projects”. It will feature the best works by the winners and finalists of this year’s edition of the festival.
The PhotoArtDoc photography festival, founded by the Belarusian Independent Photography Association and curated by Siarhei Mikhalenka, began several years ago as an independent platform at the intersection of documentary photography and art. Since then, the project has launched a number of successful initiatives, from exhibitions of winning works in Vilnius and presentations of Belarusian photobooks at European venues, including in Poland, to a major international competition attracting photographers from around the world. The winners of the 2026 competition, whose theme was “Transformation / State of Transition”, were announced in June.
Establishing its own publishing house in Lithuania is a logical step for a project that has consistently worked to build independent infrastructure for Belarusian photography after the community was forced to relocate abroad.