Osmosis

Osmosis combines archival research, contemporary photography, and writing to reinterpret Balys Buračas’s ethnographic archive. Interweaving past and present, it explores memory, overlooked women’s histories, and the passage of time.

Osmosis is a research-based photographic project that reinterprets the ethnographic archive of Balys Buračas, one of Lithuania’s most significant photographers. Approaching this historical collection from a contemporary female perspective, Dovilė Dagienė explores the intersections of personal and collective memory, history, and identity, bringing overlooked female narratives to the foreground.

Drawing on the biological concept of osmosis, the project examines photography as a permeable membrane through which images, memories, and meanings move between past and present. Archival photographs merge with contemporary compositions, blurring the boundaries between historical documents and personal experiences.

Combining archival research, contemporary photographic practices, and reflective writing, Osmosis offers a poetic yet critical reinterpretation of Lithuania’s visual heritage, transforming the photographic archive into a living space of dialogue between generations, histories, and identities.

Below are a few excerpts from the texts accompanying the photographs:

Posing for Posterity

Clearly, my relationship with ethnography has been shaped more by chance than by any conscious decision to photograph, collect, describe, or otherwise preserve cultural heritage. Once, a colleague studying philology (we were working at the same advertising agency at the time) invited me to join a weekend expedition – to travel with a group of students and university staff to nearby villages, where they planned to collect folklore. I agreed out of curiosity, hoping to encounter scenes worth photographing. I had just graduated in photography and already had some experience photographing people. I prepared myself for the possibility that I might have to persuade people at length, or accept their reluctance to be photographed. To my surprise, however, everyone we met was not only happy to pose in their natural surroundings, but also invited us into their homes, offered us food, and openly shared stories of their everyday lives. Zuzana was one of them. I no longer remember the name of the place, which I had scribbled on a scrap of paper (and probably later lost), but I clearly remember the poignant feeling of tenderness, longing, and melancholy that accompanied me on my journey home from the expedition.

Portrait of Zuzana I

Later, Zuzana’s portrait won the main prize in some competition, in the category of best portrait of a farmer. A group exhibition presenting the photographs selected in the competition travelled to various locations. When the exhibition arrived in Vilnius, the organisers invited me to the opening to collect my prize. I looked around the gallery for Zuzana’s portrait, but it was nowhere to be seen. The exhibition curator then explained that although the international jury had awarded it first place, the competition organisers considered the portrait insufficiently representative and had therefore decided not to exhibit it. Distinguished guests who overheard this threw up their hands in disbelief and loudly expressed their astonishment: how could such a thing happen! Walking home along the avenue after the event, I threw the award into the first rubbish bin I came across.

A Keepsake

Once, through an online advertisement, I bought from a woman a beautiful, rare old plant, Myrtus communis (common myrtle). No matter how carefully I tended it, the plant soon withered completely. I kept a small piece of its dried stem as a reminder of my failure.

Houseplants

For as long as I can remember, I have never been very good at growing flowers at home. Whenever I travelled or went away for any length of time, the flowers would wither. But when I became a mother, I somehow became better at taking care of the plants as well. The windowsills soon turned into miniature botanical gardens, providing refuge for plants abandoned beside rubbish containers; mimosas flourished there alongside sprouting sweet peas and lemon seeds. I even managed to grow a double avocado tree from a single seed. But the children grew up, and the houseplants began to wither again.

My Mother’s Love Language

An oxheart tomato ripening in the greenhouse.

Onė

Grandmother Onė had no children of her own. She was my grandfather’s second wife. And my grandfather was her second husband. They met and married when they were both already widowed. Onė raised her husband’s children and spoiled his grandchildren. She liked instant coffee and knew how to bake the most delicious rye bread. She wore trousers and tied a scarf around her head that was forever slipping down her hair. She was always doing something, constantly moving around the house and its surroundings. Onė’s flower garden beside the house was not large – just a few shrubs that required little care. I cannot remember Onė sitting down; even her coffee she would drink standing in the doorway. It was on top of her maiden wardrobe that we dried the cornflowers we had gathered together. There, too, I found a heavy family photograph album whose contents so powerfully stirred my curiosity and imagination. Having spent my childhood summers in the inseparable company of my grandmother and grandfather, what seemed strangest to me was that after their deaths, both were laid to eternal rest beside their first spouses.

Monika

Monika sat by the kitchen window in a nine-storey apartment block. She had been here for three days. On the first day she was curious, trying to understand where her children had brought her. On the second day she tried to warm some tea but instead left the gas on and nearly caused an explosion. On the third day, an unfamiliar girl stayed with her in the kitchen. Monika stared for a long time through the window at the five-storey building opposite and could not stop wondering:

– But how did they get that cow onto the fifth-floor balcony?

I looked out of the window.

– There’s no cow there, I said.

Monika began counting the windows. One, two, three, four...

– There! Look! I just don’t understand why they need that cow.

I sat at the table for a long time, watching Monika’s worried face, her small figure constantly jumping up from the chair towards the window, her slightly dishevelled hair.

– I don’t know. Maybe they lifted it up with a crane. But I don’t understand why they need the cow either, I said, and after a moment added: – Your brain creates beautiful things, Grandma.

Potatoes

After maternity leave, I was invited for the first time to sit on a graduation assessment committee. We spent the entire day discussing and evaluating a wide range of art projects. I felt exhilarated. At the end of the day, two professors wondered aloud why I had participated so actively in the committee discussions. One of them, chuckling sarcastically, speculated that perhaps I had spent too long at home peeling potatoes and had come up with all sorts of questions.

Close to Home

One piece of advice I often heard was to photograph what is close to home. This is a rather difficult task for a young person eager to discover the vast and distant world. Even when I came to understand the value of this advice – and began giving it myself – when I started photographing women who grew flowers in their spare time, I first looked towards distant regions. But I did not need to travel far, because everything that truly interested me was close to home.

Elena

Aunt Elena’s house was filled with countless geraniums, all giving off their strong scent. They say that when you are young, the smell of these flowers irritates you, but as you grow older, you begin to like it more and more. Just like Chanel No. 5 perfume.

Sewn-In Memory

Whenever a button needed sewing on or something had to be repaired in a hurry, my grandmother would never allow us to sew a garment while someone was still wearing it. If there was no other way, she immediately told us to bite down on the end of the thread. “Otherwise you’ll sew your memory shut and won’t remember anything”, she would say. I would recall this with horror every time I was called to the front of the classroom to recite a poem I had learned by heart.

Rose

As long as I can remember, my grandmother always had a painful leg condition which is called rožė (also the word for a rose in Lithuanian). No medicine, neither expensive nor homemade ointments or remedies, could heal it. She said she got it during her husband’s funeral when a heavy bench fell on her leg, opening a wound that never healed. She was still young then – in her early twenties.

Mother Flower

Browsing groups for plant enthusiasts, I often see portraits of garden flowers instead of members’ faces in their profile pictures. In this virtual garden, peonies, roses, tulips, and lilies dispense advice on every imaginable household matter.

Across the Atlantic

I read that Graflex Speed Graphic cameras began to be manufactured in New York in 1912. Mine, the camera I am using today, came from there too. At the time it was a modern press camera, fast and convenient for working in the street; today it is a slow and heavy box. My great-grandparents could already have seen cameras like this when they landed in America that very same year. Ona gave birth there to her first child – my grandfather – and not long afterwards returned by steamship to her native village.

Looking at Photographs

Looking more closely at my grandmother’s portrait, I noticed a small mole on her right cheek. In exactly the same place as mine. I once decided to have mine removed with a laser. Come back in a few years, the surgeon told me then. These tend to grow back.

Osmosis

Through osmotic pressure, water containing dissolved nutrients rises from the roots to the uppermost parts of a plant. Osmosis is also a process by which ideas, knowledge, and other information enter the memory without conscious effort.