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.