Bright City, Dark Times: Vilnius through the Lens of 19th-Century Photographer Wilhelm Zacharczyk / Mindaugas Meškauskas. I Am Vilnius Citizen / Dovilė Dagienė. Here Then, There Now: Location – Vilnius
7 October, 2025 – 8 March, 2026
Bright City, Dark Times: Vilnius through the Lens of 19th-Century Photographer Wilhelm Zacharczyk
Wilhelm Józef Zacharczyk’s (1841–1869) photographic collection Vilnius Album stands as one of the earliest representative visual narratives of Vilnius created in the 19th century. These luminous urban vistas were captured by a twenty-five-year-old who, in a mere year, came to know, and undoubtedly love, the city. Born in Kremenets, in Volhynia Governorate (present-day Ukraine), he arrived in Vilnius from Warsaw, where he had likely studied photography under Maksymilian Fajans, then one of Poland’s most accomplished photographers.
Whilst employed at Vilnius University Observatory, which was then establishing its solar observation and research department, he organised the photography of sunspots. Zacharczyk likely did not work overtime. Between 1865 and 1866, he produced 52 pictures of the city and its surroundings. This is an extraordinarily productive output given the constraints of the wet collodion technique.
In photographing the city, Zacharczyk turned his lens not only towards the architectural landmarks that defined Vilnius’s identity – those symbols of ancient European culture – but also captured the old suburbs and outlying areas, revealing the social fabric of this provincial imperial outpost with all its contrasts: luxury and poverty, palaces and hovels.
Even the censorship imposed on photographers by tsarist officials following the January Uprising (1863–1864), along with severe restrictions on outdoor photography, could not deter Zacharczyk from his ambitious project of assembling urban images into multiple album sets. Yet photography was not the only target of repression. Russia’s colonial policy, focused on the Russification of occupied territories, systematically undermined Lithuania’s national identity. The cornerstones of 19th-century Lithuanian identity were language and religion, and these came under direct assault: the forced transliteration of Lithuanian texts into Cyrillic script was directly linked to the conversion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy. These were dark times indeed.
In the 21st century, Wilhelm Zacharczyk’s photographs offer us a unique opportunity to revisit vanished or transformed places of Vilnius, to witness the cityscape during one of the capital’s most turbulent periods, and to remember the enduring lessons of history.
Dainius Junevičius, Margarita Matulytė
Mindaugas Meškauskas. I Am Vilnius Citizen
Working with the 19th-century wet collodion technique, I used portraiture as a research tool; I invited people of different ages, professions and backgrounds to be photographed and asked them a simple yet multilayered question: “Are you a Vilnius citizen?”
The wet collodion process is a photographic method invented in 1851, in which a glass or metal plate coated with a light-sensitive emulsion of collodion and silver nitrate must be exposed and developed while still wet, because once it begins to dry, it becomes unusable. The process is slow; everything – from preparing the chemicals to the final pure silver image – is done manually. I work exactly as Wilhelm Zacharcyzk did in the 19th century. The subject must remain perfectly still for several seconds. There is no hiding behind a smile or a role. This is not an instantaneous snapshot but a dialogue, not posing but an encounter that allows both the person and their character to emerge. Those few seconds in a single frame capture essence, an authenticity that today is so often hidden beneath learnt smiles directed at one’s surroundings.
Through this series of portraits, I encourage reflection on identity, community, and history. The exhibition title was deliberately conceived by paraphrasing US President John F. Kennedy’s historic phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” spoken in 1963 in the heart of divided Berlin. This was a political act of identification with freedom and the city. The words “I am a Vilnius citizen” represent the same kind of declaration today.
Who has the right to say this? Is it birthright, privilege, or choice? Not everyone was born here. Not everyone has ancestors buried in Rasos or Bernardine cemeteries. But all these people live here, create, work, raise children, and tie their future to Vilnius. This is how I see the citizens of Vilnius. This is how I see the face of the city. I see it today. When I meet people in Vilnius who claim to be citizens of Vilnius, I do not ask for proof of origin. It’s sufficient for me to see their contributions.
This is not a collection of portraits but of declarations. About a city shaped by perspectives, not architecture. About the freedom to belong in the city. About a living, growing Vilnius where everyone who identifies with it is free to say: ‘I am a Vilnius citizen.
Mindaugas Meškauskas
Dovilė Dagienė. Here Then, There Now: Location – Vilnius
Sunlight takes about eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth, a brief interval that connects the vastness of space with our immediate experience. In this series, Dovilė Dagienė uses this cosmic journey as a framework to explore the nature of time, space, and how we perceive reality.
Each photograph in this body of work is, in fact, a double exposure, capturing sunlight with an exact eight-minute interval between the two shots. This method transcends the traditional static image, incorporating the irreversible flow of physical time into a single frame. In doing so, it challenges our conception of photography as a mere snapshot of isolated moments.
By uniting minutes, centimeters, and light years on a single scale, the series invites us to contemplate our place in the universe. The work juxtaposes the infinitesimal with the infinite, highlighting how our everyday experiences are inherently linked to cosmic processes.
Combining astrophysical concepts with traditional black-and-white photography, Dagienė bridges science with visual representation. This integration suggests that understanding reality requires a multidisciplinary approach, blending empirical knowledge with experiential intuition. It emphasizes how our perception is shaped not only by direct sensory experience but also by the tools and concepts we use to interpret the world.
The series Here Then, There Now was inspired by the sun photographed by Wilhelm Zacharczyk at the Vilnius University Observatory in the 19th century. Dagienė’s works serve as a bridge between the immediate and the infinite. They invite reflection on the flow of time and the ways we construct our inner images of the world.
Stefano Ruffa
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