Mobile Manifesto coming soon

Taking a camera for a walk

Concrete

Further to my mission as Vilnius’ unofficial cultural and historical flaneur, today I explored a couple of other sights in the city to help (hopefully) bring about more concrete ideas about the Borders project. In fact, concrete was the very word today. Vilnius’ magnificent (or is it grotesque?) and crumbling Palace of Concerts and Sports (Koncertų ir Sporto Rūmai) is an extraordinary piece of Soviet Brutalist architecture, and a particularly poignant symbol of Lithuanian dominance of the region and its attempts at destroying everything racially different that went before it. Built in 1971, the Palace of Concerts and Sports occupies a large section of the city’s former Jewish Cemetery (see previous posts for more on the subject), which opened way back in 1487 and was closed some time in the middle of the 19th century, about 100 years before it was desecrated in the name of Socialism. The building also holds the honour of being the venue for the infamous Sąjūdis Conference, when the Lithuanian version of Solidarity among other things reintroduced the non-Soviet Lithuanian flag and gave the Cathedral back to the Roman Catholic Church. Interestingly, especially as the event was exactly 20 years ago (Sąjūdis I should mention were one of the major forces in helping destroy the USSR), no monument stands to mark the event. I did notice however that a new(ish) monument to the Jewish cemetery has been placed outside. Further along the Neris river to the northeast is the site of the soon-to-open Tuskulėnų Rimties Parkas (Tuskulėnai Peace Park)built on the grounds of the 19th-century Tuskulėnų Dvaras (Tuskulėnai Manor) which was taken over by the KGB at the end of WWII and in whose grounds the bodies of 766 Lithuanian victims of the Soviets were found a few years ago. The site is being turned into yet another symbol of Lithuanian suffering at the hands of the Soviets, which, especially when you remember that the Lithuanians and Soviets made a deal over Vilnius in 1944 that effectively cleansed the city of its majority Polish population (among them the photographer Jan Bułhak - see earlier post), does look rather stupid. It’s precisely this ridiculous version of Lithuanian history that’s inspiring me to work on a project that addresses something a little more along the lines of the truth. Anyway, I’m not here to hold a grudge or to get too involved emotionally, I’m merely interested in how the city really grew. I’m starting to see the project as it’s going to be. More of that later.

The flaneur

Yesterday I went and had a look at the kenesa in Vilnius, one of (allegedly) only three surviving active ones left on the planet. A kenesa is the religious building of the karaite, a peculiar sect of Judaism who were believed to have broken away from Rabbinic Judaism in the mists of time in Baghdad. The karaite were bought to Lithuania by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas (Polish, Witold, 1350-1430) as bodyguards and who still remain in small numbers, notably in the old Lithuanian capital at Trakai (Polish, Troki). Resplendent in their pointy boots and Oriental attire, the karaite represent much that has more or less vanished (or been removed) from the cultural makeup of Lithuania. They’re mentioned in the City of Strangers book, briefly, as are the Tartars, who once had a large community in Vilnius in what’s now known as the Lukiškės area of the city. Incidentally, this explains the Islamic graves I found in Vilnius (see earlier post). The book is doing an extraordinary job at recreating the recent past of this city, and is both helping and muddying my quest. The book is really a history of the city as told by outsiders who visited over the centuries, some of them famous authors, others more humble visitors. I’ve just been reading about Paul Otto Heinrich Fechter (1880-1958), a German submarine pilot during WWI and, under the pseudonym Paul Monty the author of a guidebook to Vilnius during the German occupation of the city from 1915 to 1918. Wanderstunden in Wilna (Wandering in Vilnius) speaks volumes about the way I feel not just about Vilnius but about my own fascination with cities. I’ve called myself an urban rambler for a long time, and I suppose it’s this obsession (or partly this obsession) that drove me into my current line of business. Paul Monty’s book is written for occupying German soldiers, and appeals directly to the flaneur, which is another word for urban rambler I suppose. Anyway, get from the book:

In this world, the right to conquer foreign cities in a privilege reserved only to a few mighty rulers and military leaders, but every traveller can successfully master unknown cities if he perfects the art of wandering. If the traveller is a clever strategist, he will certainly consult various maps and chronicles before he ventures into a strange town. If the traveller is an artist - and wandering is the freest form of art - he will approach the city from a completely different perspective. Without any hesitation, the urban wanderer will let fresh air guide him through the unfamiliar streets of the far-flung city. This form of travelling has the potential of breaking every kind of fortification. Fortunately for the traveller, our good old Wilna is blessed with a perpetual breeze, creating perfect conditions for endless roaming through its streets and squares.

It’s almost as if this was written for me.

Thinking

Border expansion

Slowly ploughing through the City of Strangers book, which despite containing a number of minor factual errors is the best thing I ever read about Vilnius. Consequently, and for reasons I’ll go into later, I’m now thinking about spreading the ‘borders’ of the project to outside the confines of the old city walls, including the whole of Vilnius as the subject. I need to think about this in more detail, but so far it makes sense. I really like the way my ideas chop and change. Anyway, today I briefly the Dawn Gate (Aušros Vartai), the single remaining gate of the five originally built into the city walls at the start of the 16th century. It contains a small chapel with a likeness of the Virgin Mary inside and is considered to have magical powers. Almost everybody who walks through the gates will glance up at the Madonna (turning round first if they’re walking into Old Town) and cross themselves. Some will go on their knees, and some will stay down for a long time. I took a few snaps (above) to get some ideas about how I could do a postcard about it, and am still thinking. Whatever, it’s one of the most important places in the city, regardless of one’s opinion about religion. I then took a number of bus journeys (above) in a fruitless attempt to find a jar of peanut butter. It seems there’s none left in the country. I like the people I find on buses and in the markets. Visually I believe the city deserves more than just what I can achieve in Old Town. Time to start talking to people about this in more detail. I’m starting to drown in my thoughts.

100 Strangers

Another interesting use for Flickr, here.

This is great!

Over the page in the Prologue (see previous post) and I’m introduced to the photographer Jan Bułhak (1876-1950), of whom I’ve never heard of until just now. In short he’s a famous Polish photographer, but as you start to look at his life you discover that he was born in a part of Russia that’s now Belarus and spent a large part of his life in Vilnius, or Wilno as it was known at the time, having recently changed hands from the Russia, via the German occupation of the city during WWI, to Poland.

Bułhak also wrote. Get this.

True Wilno remains closed and silent to snobs. Is it worth it to reveal your real treasures to souvenir-hunting vandals and ignorant blockheads? The city speaks softly of simple and noble things, and does not open up for everyone.

Beer!

City of Strangers

The quest for the centre always starts with the demarcation of the peripheries, for no middle point can be found without first identifying and then measuring the margins. Borders uphold the centre, they give it a sense of gravity, keep it alive.

From the Prologue of VILNIUS: City of Strangers (2008, Baltas Lankos, Vilnius), by the Lithuanian-Canadian academic Laimonas Briedas, which I’m reviewing for work purposes and will also be delving into in depth for the Borders research. In the words of my friend Dovid Katz, who contributed to the blub on the back, ‘At long last, a book that does not seek to impose a politically correct, ultranationalistic, retrospective ‘Vilnius’ on the many centuries of Vilna, Vilne and Wilno.’

My sentiments exactly, as I hope my blog posts on the Borders theme over the previous few weeks bear witness. At last I can feel some momentum.


Now for some beer.

First list for expansion

* Race
* Religion and religious buildings
* Streets
* Sights (including Vilnius University)
* Tourists
* Locals (including expats)

Vilnius continued

Started reading Tomas Venclova’s dreary but informative book about Vilnius. Bursting with fat, delicious facts. He points out that Vilnius has not only always been a border town but that the borders in question have changed. During the golden age of Lithuania in the middle of the 15th century, Lithuania was the largest country in Europe, its eastern border touching the Black Sea. With the western half of the country in German hands, Vilnius sat at the very west of the country. Today it sits at the far east, just 30km from Belarus. The book also has some valuable information about the old walls, that stood for 300 years and that were built in fear of a hostile Tartar invasion that never came. I think the walls don’t offer enough for the Borders project in themselves, and would force me to do something that may well look good but that would suffer from a confused text. I’m now looking at opening up the project visually to incorporate the whole of Old Town, incorporating previous ideas and looking at the city’s history through modern photography. I’m also curiously (and perhaps obviously) drawn to tourism. What is it that people are feeding on intellectually and spiritually when they jog from church to church? There’s a fascinating border here in the grey area between what little (usually biased) information they absorb courtesy of guided tours etc, and the facts about the places they visit as they really are. Not very explained I’m afraid. More to follow. I’m beginning to see the light.

Daniel, Dainius and Danutė

In the words of Nathan Barley, I’m a self-facilitating media node. Or something. Whatever I am, I know that ideas are nothing without action. As mentioned before, I’ve had an idea for a long time to borrow from several historical media sources and develop a documentary photography project that involves me in all of the major production processes with the exception of actually taking the photographs. For a long time now I’ve toyed with the idea of some kind of project about Lithuanians living in the UK. I first met Dainius in my local bar in Vilnius in 2001. A country boy at heart, Dainius worked at a fairly high level in a printing house, but despite his love of the job was depressed by his ridiculous low salary, the fact that without the right education he had no chance of climbing up the professional ladder (experience means nothing in Lithuania, it’s all about pieces of paper and/or the right cousin in the right place) and a particularly bad run of luck with women. In 2005 at the age of 30 Dainius borrowed some money from me, registered with an employment agency and was soon on his way to Leeds in the UK to attend to the needs of pensioners in a large home. Via a brief job in a printing house in Yorkshire, Dainius slowly adapted to his new life, learnt English (albeit with a Yorkshire accent) and is now working as a care assistant for one young English man called Daniel, who is confined to a wheelchair and who is paralysed in both his arms and his legs. Daniel appears to be the life and soul of the party and has rapidly become friends with Dainius, who’s also managed to find himself a girlfriend, a Lithuanian called Danutė. Excited, intrigued and interested by all of this I decided to ask Dainius if he’s be prepared to start recording his life on his Nokia. We began a couple of days ago, and heaven knows where it’s going to lead. His currently taking pictures on his mobile phone of the places and people in his life. As they start getting fed back to me I hope I can make sense of them and begin to work on an idea for a story, which will also include, I hope, extracts from Dainius’ diary. Cutting edge Nokumentary™ perhaps, maybe nothing will come of it. Whatever, it looks like it’s going to be an experiment worth investing time in.

Some more interesting things at Flickr

Here

Here

Here

Note to self

Visit all the main places of interest in Old Town. Look at them and at the people in and around them.

Border development notes part 999

I'm not in the least bit interested in what kind of photographs I'm going to take for the Borders project, not least because I don’t really know what the project’s going to be about. I have a subject (Vilnius old defensive wall) and a lot of other things that fascinate me concerning Lithuania as it reaches its thousandth birthday (see previous posts). I also have to keep focused on the fact that what I want to produce must in some way relate to my current profession. Research and pre-production is what it’s all about at the moment. I’m enjoying talking to others about what I’m doing and I’m also enjoying tracking down literature related to the subjects mentioned above. Juggling this and other commitments isn’t easy, but I seem to be doing ok and getting there slowly. Interestingly, I’ve landed on my feet with the new job, which technically starts at the end of the month. It’s nice that I’ve got a researcher who can help me, and even nicer that I can combine my day job with the project. Looking at the photographs of the wall I took on Sunday I notice that they all either show signs of human interference (usually but not exclusively in the form of graffiti). I’m interested in the way society progresses according to the political situation at the time. I really felt this yesterday when I was walking past a huge building site, located in the north of Vilnius on land that was once a vast military barracks used by both the occupying troops of tsarist and Soviet Russia. This is also the land where an enormous grave of some 2,000 Napoleonic soldiers was unearthed when development in the area first started in 2002. I’m waffling again. I need to read a couple of books and then really start putting the project together visually. Watch this space.

Walking again

Map 2

Marked in green, parts of the wall that I know still exist.

Wall update

Yesterday I completed the circle and found, more or less, where the last part of the wall went. I ended up in the Museum of Applied Art, which stands on what was the far northeastern corner of the wall. Actually, the original wall’s still there, hidden inside. The main archway through to the exhibition spaces is the original city gate, this one Gothic red brick. I also finally realised what a ghastly piece of marble public art next to the Cathedral is. I’ve walked past it (and on it) a million times and just thought it was a typically lacklustre monument. Rectangular, maybe five metres long, two metres wide and less than a metre high, it clearly marks the spot where Vilnius’ old defensive wall stood. If you stand on it and look in either direction, you can see the sense in it. I’ve always wanted to be a detective. This is fun. I’ve now made a map of where the wall was. Next, I need to do one and mark where parts of the original wall still exist. Why? I don’t know. It’s all part of the process I guess. Once you put a line around something it becomes a country, a city-state. I thought about portraits of citizens of the city-state. I thought about portraits of people I know. I’m still not sure. I need to keep looking into the subject. The more I look, the more the project will reveal itself to me. I found some interesting models of Vilnius as it looked over the centuries in the museum as well as several paintings of the same subject. The paintings especially show life inside and outside the defensive walls. Quite powerful stuff. There’s a book about Old Town by a Lithuanian writer by the name of Tomas Venclova. There’s an English translation. The next thing I need to do is to read it. Finally, to get back to the Lithuanian language thing, here are three translations of words related to this project. All are related to the root ‘wall’. The Lithuanian word for foreigner literally translates as ‘beyond the wall’.

• Wall siena
• Border siena, pasienis
• Foreigner užsienietis

More about Flickr

I've just been approached by a hotel and tour agency in Albania if they can use this photograph in their promotional material. I'm sure it won't pay for a new car, but it does show that people are using Flickr in a few professional ways. Just sayin'.

One false start and I'm off

There’s a muddle in my mind. Fundamentally it’s about what I want to do and what I think I should be doing (see the earlier Banksy quote for clarification). Partly it’s a confusion about the way in which I want to produce the Borders photographs (spontaneous, like the Eastbourne Pier pictures, versus tight, controlled, composed portraits) and, perhaps most importantly, it’s about where I want to do them. Druskininkai and Palanga are fine ideas, but on a practical level the prospect of making several repeat trips to places relatively far away from Vilnius is making me shy away from my original idea. At least for the moment. As I’m in Vilnius, and will be tied down here for a few months at least (I’m taking over the editor-in-chief’s black swivel chair at Vilnius In Your Pocket for a while) I should really do something in this city. As such, consider Palanga and Druskininkai a false start (albeit a false start that’s generated lots of interesting ideas that I can feed into the Vilnius project). Vilnius defensive walls it is then. The wall once signified one’s place in society. You were either ‘in it’ or you weren’t. Despite its removal, this situation still exists today. What’s known as Old Town (Senamiestis) remains the place to be, despite the wall not being there anymore. Most expats live in Old Town (it’s from my friend’s apartment in Old Town that I’m writing this post in fact), as do many rich Lithuanians. The best hotels are here too. Now that I’m focused on this project, the first main question is do I keep the project wall-related (at least visually) or do I open it up and concentrate on the things on either side of the wall? More food for thought. I’m still very interested in a project made up of portraits of people against what’s either left of the wall or against walls in general. I should say at this point that I don’t want to say anything big or clever. I only want to show the world in an interesting way, the world in this instance being the centre of the capital of Lithuania. I’m still very interested in the historical and cultural aspects of the project, and will borrow these from the two abandoned ideas and try to fit them into the new project.

Here are my current project rules and guidelines

• The words and pictures have to be related but at the same time there should be a distance between them. A border even.

• The work must be produced using domestic photographic equipment.

• An element of chance and randomness must exist in the practical work.

• The work must be commercially viable.

• The finished product should be presented as a series of postcards.

I’ve been looking at old documents, maps etc, and have almost completed a map of where the original wall and city gates once stood. I’ve almost completed it. Two minor surprises (very minor in fact) were that the northeastern section of the city defences was in fact a river. No wall stood here as far as I can tell. Secondly, and again it comes as no surprise, the royal palace, cathedral and arsenal were contained within a second defensive wall that made up the town’s original castle, which is now most destroyed. I haven’t managed to find a section along the western side of the city, and am just about to go out and see if I can find some clues. This is fun detective work. There’s nothing available on the internet show where the original walls stood in relation to the city as it is today. I’ve emailed the department at the Municipality responsible for the wall project I think I already mention but have had no reply.

This is fun.

Finally, I should mention that I’m rather please that this project should coincide with my current employment. The two are nicely related, so I won’t have to jump from work to school to such an extent as before. It also means I can publish some of the project as I go along.

Amsterdam reflected

Looking through Flickr as I do and found this guy. I really like some of this stuff. All of it shot using a mobile phone I should add. See more of his reflections here.

Thinking

Find more photos like this on mapjd08online

Seasonal pics

Lithuania. Autumn, soon to be winter. There’s a grey lid snapped tight on the sky and from my experience of six previous winters in Lithuania (this is assuming that I’ll be here for the next few months, still not 100% certain) there’s not going to be too many sunny days. This needs to be evaluated and taken into consideration when thinking about long-term photographic projects. In short, things look different when the sun’s not shining. Grey lids snapped tight on the sky create the perfect conditions for portraits. The light’s just right. Another reason why I’m interested in doing a series of outdoor portraits. This kind of light also adds something to messed-up, crumbling walls.

Vilnius wall portraits, point-and-shot, remember

Vilnius walls

Today I went for a walk in Vilnius, trying to follow the old city wall, of which nearly every last part of it was either knocked down or incorporated into new buildings by the occupying Russians some time in the early 19th century (facts to follow). It was an intriguing adventure, providing me with quite a lot to think about on the subject of borders. Good timing too, as the Municipality is working on a project to locate any original parts of the wall and restore them to how they looked during their glory days. I’m too tired to write now, but I should quickly say that if, as I think I already mentioned, I’m going to be stuck in Vilnius for a while, then I need to find a Borders project here. Old defensive city walls are interesting things indeed, and the remaining parts of the defensive wall in Vilnius is particularly interesting for reasons to be revealed at another time. I quite like the idea of walking the old route regularly and photographing people with the wall in the background as I go along. Watch this space. Oh, and I’ve started Mobile Nation. Somebody is already taking photographs of their life with their mobile phone. More of that later as well. It really is an extraordinary thing. I really am too tired to write now. What’s important now is the process, not the theme. I’m interested in how I approach pieces of work. Goodnight.

Scribble notes found when tidying up

• Rediscover my Visaginas style. Meet people spontaneiously and photograph them. Develop the idea
• What's it really like in x?
• Roads (literally Street photography)
• Routes
• Railways
• Walks
• Water journeys
• Etc
• Cuban Jews
• Blueprint magazine
• Danius photography project
• Family photography
• Individuals
• Norman Wisdom and Albania
• Old fashioned Montenegrin hairdresser
• Black and white series about a caberet singer in Ulnicj
• Podgorica street photography
• 24 hours in...
• Corporate photography (Nigel)
• Vanishing Lithuania
• Countryside in the summer
• Lithuanians abroad
• North Korea
• Casting agencies (wannabes)
• Gdansk shipyards
• Chicken Brothers
• Parcel gardens (działki (ogródek działkowy))
• Palace of Culture
• Warsaw Central Train Station
• Goat farming
• Miscellaneous portraits, Kosovo
• Miscellaneous portraits, Cuba
• Feeding of the pigs
• One hour projects
• Streets

Travel and Tourism

Just noticed that LCC run courses in Travel and Tourism. Would like to know more.

Eastern border ideas

The combination of an upcoming heavy workload, a serious lack of money and the simple fact that I want to start experimenting with Borders ideas has led me to start looking for ideas closer to home. I’ve always been intrigued by a tiny part of Lithuania just southeast of Vilnius that’s shaped like the nub of a jigsaw piece and that slots neatly into the western part of Belarus. I’ve no idea if this tiny little area’s got a name or anything else about it for that matter, but I do know that the language spoken in the area is a peculiar dialect of Lithuanian, Polish and Belarusian. Looking at it in detail using the highly recommended www.viamichelin.com, the place has a handful of tiny tracks and two roads that cross over into Belarus (albeit neither of them actual border crossings). Doing a quick bit of research I found out that one of the area’s tiny villages, Poškonys, is noted for its well preserved, 19th-century main street. This small and possibly insignificant fact does at least give me an incentive to go and explore. I now need to get somebody interested enough to take me there in a car. I really do like the idea of marching into unknown territory with a half-baked plan. I also read that nearby, close to the small village of Merkinė (there are two Merkinės in Lithuania, this is the one to the east of the capital, not the larger town just north of Druskininkai) lies the remains of a manor house with a remarkable history. Covering an area of less than three square miles, this was the site of the so-called Pavlova Republic (Paulavos Respublika). Founded by a man by the name of Povilas Bžostovskis and lasting from 1769 until 1797, the Pavlova Republic broke away from traditional serfdom and introduced a radical system of governance that included its own president (none other than Mr Bžostovskis himself) and that even had its own flag and currency. The republic was officially recognised by the Lithuanian-Polish parliament, became relatively wealthy, and was finally wiped out by the third partition of the region by the Russians. Hopefully I can get to see all of this on Sunday. Watch this space.

Madness

Travelling

Dancing in Warsaw

The world isn’t a stage, it’s a dancehall. Cities are huge dance floors full of people of every imaginable size, shape, colour, all dancing to the sound of a silent tune, whether they’re at work, shopping, picnicking in a park or simply getting from a to b. Just like its cousin the point and shoot camera, a camera phone takes forever to focus and set the exposure, sympathising with the dancers it films in its own whimsical manner, making a mockery of the photographer and producing accidental images that are more often than not badly composed disasters but that are occasionally astonishing. Walking through streets, markets, parks and shopping centres, standing on a tram, I’ve been predicting moments before they happen and shooting them as best I can, always without looking at the screen and shooting everything blind. This is merely an experiment, but I like it. I’ve thought long and hard about the idea of the street being a stage that one waits to be populated, and I still don’t like this way of working. True it almost always guarantees better photographs than taking them by running around pointing a mobile phone at things, but I feel there’s something (excuse the pun) staged about it, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. These seven photographs are the result of a reasonably quick experiment I tried out in Warsaw last week. A logical progression from what I was doing with my Eastbourne Pier postcards, expect more in the future. Larger versions of these photographs, with brief explanations, can currently be seen on DRR.

All over the place

Work, life, head, philosophy, all over the place. Time to start putting things together.

Mobile Nation and other thoughts

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but Banksy remarked once something along the lines that he doesn’t go to a restaurant because he wants to have a shit. I’m neither a fan of Banksy nor do I believe what he says is true about himself, but it’s a quote I really like all the same. I’ve just got out the bath, where I was both trying to warm up a bit (no heating in Vilnius for another couple of weeks and already freezing cold) as well as absorb the first group tutorial of the new term. Of the many good things to come out of it (the tutorial, not the bath) I was struck by the momentary touching on the subject of amateur versus professional, vis Flickr, which in turn reminded me of Banksy’s quote. Forgive me for the stream of consciousness that’s about to follow. As far as I understand it, this course is primarily about the understanding and acquisition of the two things that go together to make a professional photojournalist and/or documentary photographer. Firstly, it (the course) provides a path that leads to a personal understanding of the language of the medium. Second, it provides an insight into the world of the professional, ie. how one can best prepare oneself to make money from photography. If you think about it, like I am now, it makes one wonder what a professional actually is. The definition is of course somebody who makes money (or a living) from what they do, as opposed to an amateur (from the Latin amātor, lover). In reality it’s much more complicated that that, and I wonder if one can be a professional by using only one of the two above-mentioned criteria. The answer is if course Yes. I can think of plenty of people earning good money in publishing who are pretty useless at their jobs and who certainly don’t understand the business. Likewise, I know plenty of people who create things professionally without earning a penny. My oldest and best friend Al for example built this lovely house. Basically, Al didn’t like what the architect was doing, sacked him, picked up his tools and did the job himself. If anybody’s still reading this, I think it’s only fair to jump in quick and say that this interesting area is a border, one that from time to time, certainly when I’m doing things with my mobile phone, informs my photography in one way or another. Whether I’m conscious of it or not, when I’m producing what I believe to be serious work using my Nokia I’m exploring the interesting, grey and often controversial area between what’s accepted as amateur and what’s accepted as professional. I find this interesting. Really interesting. One of the things I think about is that if it can be shown that toys such as mobile phones can be used to create serious work then this, theoretically at least, opens the door to a massive section of society who remain silent and at the mercy of so-called professionals. At times I find this almost obscene. The BBC and others have done great work with this idea, notably with such groundbreaking work as the Video Nation series (a piece of sheer genius bought about by the advent of the camcorder, check out the BBC website for more). Maybe it’s time for a Mobile Nation. Maybe not. It seems to me at times that how the message is delivered is far more important than the message itself. There was an argument when I worked in television that ‘broadcast standard’ (ie. high quality (expensive to produce) video was a union invention, used to secure people’s jobs. If it was this (it was certainly partly this), then the unions failed. I wonder how much this argument can be used in photojournalism and documentary photography? My mind’s racing now. I need to think about this some more. I had an idea right at the start of this course for producing some work that would be photographed not by myself. If photojournalism is so keen to reinvent itself with the use of moving images then surely there’s no reason why documentary photographers can’t become directors, especially if the director remains responsible for the project planning and the editing. That the very medium that we’re currently studying is teetering on the edge of two borders at the moment is truly interesting stuff.

Druskininkai

Last year I bought a collection of early Krzysztof Kieślowski documentaries on DVD, films that in my opinion far outshine any of his later works of fiction. If you ever get the chance to see them, do. This has got nothing to do with this post. I’m currently in Krakow, where I travelled to via Druskininkai and Warsaw. Druskininkai, which if anybody ever reads this blog will know, is the second Lithuanian town that I’m thinking about producing a series of postcards for using Borders as the theme. I arrived there lunchtime last Tuesday, visited a few cemeteries but failed to find any Tatar graves (at least any with Arabic writing on them). My suspicion is that the Tatars assimilated so much into local life that their gravestones were marked in either Russian, Belarusian, Polish or Lithuanian. The town’s old cemetery, conveniently located next to the bus station, was as I suspected a truly multicultural affair, although as usual the Jewish cemetery was located apart from the main one. As well as skulking about looking for suspicious writing, I got some nice pictures of old ladies in traditional coloured headscarves as you can see before spending the rest of the day and the following morning wandering around, visiting places I’d planned to see as well as allowing myself the space to have plenty of happy accidents (see recent posts for more). I also visited the local museum, little more than a collection of small rooms that with the help of old photographs, furniture, maps, letters, bottles, pianos etc charts the rise of Druskininkai, showing without a shadow of a doubt that the town was predominantly Polish despite it being yet another place that the Lithuanians like to consider their own. One thing I didn’t realise is that Druskininkai was between the wars well and truly a border town. Nowadays it’s a couple of kilometres from Belarus, but between 1920 and 1939 it was in Poland, separated from Lithuania by the Nemunas river which runs through the town. There’s a tiny island on the river, called Love Island (Meilės Sala), which according to maps of the time was half in Poland and half in Lithuania. This is quite common throughout the world, but what was extraordinary in this case was that the island was in use as part of the holiday resort. There were even photographs in the museum of Poles lying on the island’s miniscule beach some time during the 1920s. The mind boggles. There’s an entire story just in this, but I’ll save it for another time. For more information about some of the interesting characters who lived in Druskininkai, see earlier posts. The Jewish Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz (born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, Lithuanian Žakas Lipšicas, 1891-1973), was born here. His childhood home, opposite the hotel his father owned that’s now the town’s Best Western, is a museum, but has been closed for ages, and nobody knows when it’s going to open again. I’m still trying to make some logical conclusions from what’s clearly a national obsession with obliterating anything from the past that wasn’t Lithuanian. Anyway, more about Druskininkai later. I just want to mention before finishing that the ancient bus that took me from Druskininkai to Marijampolė (known as Kapsukas during the Soviet occupation, after the founder of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Vincas Mickevičius-Kapsukas (1880-1935), and, incidentally, the only town in Lithuania to be renamed under the Communists), where I picked up the Warsaw train, was full of country folk. These people are like they’re straight out of the Middle Ages. Lithuania is Africa. I’m beginning to understand and even occasionally sympathise with the Lithuanian obsession with clinging onto the past, although I’ll never truly admire it. Writing about photography is like dancing about architecture. Onwards and upwards.

Thinking

The quality of randomness, spontaneity, surprise, unexpectedness and irrationality in our lives is a very precious thing

Simon Jeffes (1949-1997)

Dancing in Warsaw