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| Sunday, 22 February 2004 |
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Voyages through Sri Lanka by ROHAN CANAGASABEY "In the early sixties, Nihal Fernando and Studio Times embarked on a voyage of discovery and photography.
Travelling the by-roads and walking the jungle paths, rowing upstream and downstream, flying low below the clouds, they began voyaging, exploring, discovering and photographing Sri Lanka, the land and its inhabitants". So states the press release on the exhibition of images from Studio Times archives, to be held at the Harold Peiris Gallery, Lionel Wendt Art Centre from Friday, February 27 to Tuesday, March 2 inclusive. The photographs to be exhibited, both in colour and black and white, are in three different sections. As an introduction, Voyages of the Past - consist of images captured from sketches of Ceylon during the colonial period, held in museums and libraries. One is by Eugene De Ransonnet of a footpath amidst the leech-infested dense forest on the way to Adam's Peak from Pelmadulla or Ratnapura. Another of the several sketches in shades of brown and white, is by Prince Alexis Soltykoff, illustrating a tethered wild elephant being taken away by mahouts on tame elephants, watched over by their colonial masters from a tree hut and several bare-chested locals in various tasks down below. And an aesthetic beautification of colonial supervision of the "natives". Voyages of the Sixties and Seventies, would perhaps be of more interest to most people, as they depict Nihal Fernando's pursuit of capturing the essence of Sri Lanka's landscape, wildlife, archaeological sites and culture, the latter mostly of the majority Sinhalese. Of the mostly black and white images, a photo of the undulating hills of Horton Plains interspersed with reams of clouds or the simple image of a girl walking in grassland, near Anuradhapura, with sunlight illuminating the leaves of the overhanging tree above her, spring to mind. Others that caught my eye was an image of a woman seated beside the doorway of her hut, with the shadows in front of her enhancing an excellent composition.
Another excellent composition in black and white uses the mats laid out with freshly caught fish that lead the eye of the viewer to the fisherman standing at the end, just below the beach on the near horizon at Negombo. Apart from several wildlife photos, there are also ones depicting sites of archaeological interest. One is that of the remaining base of an ancient monument of a rearing horse facing the sea at Kudremalai point. Its height has been calculated at 35 feet from the size of the foot still attached to the base. Forays into Jaffna have resulted in black and white photos of the now non-existent Jaffna Fort, as well as an exquisite image of the dining room of the curator of Kayts Fort, taken in 1965. Nihal Fernando's favourite photo of this period, is the black and white image of four villagers harvesting paddy at Mihintale. Their backs are to the camera in a horizontal line across the image, which is broken more than halfway up, by the end of the paddy field, and the beginning of a line of trees, with one particularly tall tree reaching out to the sky, at the end of the frame. My favourite one of this period was another black and white image taken by Nihal Fernando at Yala National Park. It depicts the sand dunes beside the seaside, the wind having made a series of parallel curving lines on them. The footprints of a departed animal break these, from its beginnings in the foreground to disappearing into the summit of the sand dunes from which a lone bush is cast against the backdrop of an empty sky. The final section is more recent, being titled Voyages of this Millenium, with colour images more in evidence than black and white ones and are by Nihal Fernando as well as several by members of his small number of staff at Studio Times. Nihal Fernando, captures the innocence of childhood, in a colour image depicting two naked children bathing under a small waterfall amidst boulders on a stream at Nagrac, en-route to Horton Plains.
Whilst his photograph of terraced paddy farming, uses the colours to depict diagonally, thus moving the viewers eye, from the brown plots in the bottom left to the farmers in line tending their plots in the middle of the frame and then to the greener plots and onto the trees in the top right. A photograph that uses a diagonal dissection is one by Christopher Silva at Tabbowa tank. Figures in silhouette are set against the backdrop of the shimmering blue and silver water as they are interspersed across the edge of the grassy bund of the tank, which rises near the bottom left to almost the top right of the frame. Another striking colour image by Nihal Fernando, is that of a woman reaching out to lay more of her washing beside her washed purple saree set on the brown stony ground beside the Malwatu Oya near Anuradhapura. As a photographer, Nihal Fernando said he was constantly striving to capture the essence of Sinhalese culture, and pointed to one of his photographs taken at Anuradhapura. It depicts a family in the foreground - and out of the frame, paddy fields below them - looking out across the waters of the Bassavakkulama at the Ruwanvelisaya on the hazy horizon. The exhibition is a chronological visual history, with many impressive images, of the landscape, wildlife, archaeology and culture of Sri Lanka - mostly that of the Sinhalese - and well worth a visit. |
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