Major project test walk

The Karaite

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CITY OF STRANGERS

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.
Anatole France (1844-1924)

City of Strangers borrows its title from the US-based Lithuanian geographer-historian Laimonas Briedis' 2008 book of the same name and examines one of the book’s main themes, namely that Vilnius, a city whose physical and ethnic borders have been shifting constantly throughout history, belongs to nobody except to those who live in it at the time. An ongoing project that will grow into my main master’s degree work, the title is also a tongue-in-cheek pun reflecting both my own temporary status as an observer in the city as well as my non-relationship with the project’s subjects.

An experiment in furtive street photography with the aid of a Nokia mobile phone, City of Strangers is the culmination of several abandoned attempts at a Borders-related project.

From my blog entry, Friday October 17, 2008…

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.

The above quote from the Prologue of Briedis’ book was the major starting point of my own Borders journey. It also says much about the journey itself. Back then I was already researching multi-ethnicity in historical Lithuania, and toyed with the idea of looking at two different Lithuanian towns with the help of my Nokia. I visited both places, took photographs, examined all sorts of controversial ethnic angles and finally decided that not only was the project impossible to capture photographically but that spending much time in the two places was a ridiculously unrealistic idea.

Briedis’ chapter on the German occupation of Vilnius from 1915 to 1918 had introduced me to the concept of the flâneur, a French word meaning one who strolls, saunters or loafs, and a word that Baudelaire interpreted as meaning someone who experiences a city by walking its streets. This was an epiphany that spoke directly to me as somebody who’d been doing just that photographically for the past couple of years.

The mobile phone is the ideal flâneur accessory, allowing freedom to move about without being weighed down with any cumbersome equipment. It’s dual functionality also creates opportunities to create photographs hitherto impossible to make. Is he taking a picture or is he writing an SMS? Perhaps most importantly, the photographs that currently make up City of Strangers serve as a pictorial reminder of how a certain section of society looked in Vilnius in 2009.