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'.