The Wendt Gaze

As we turn our eye towards Sri Lanka and its artistic geniuses, we look at the photographic oeuvre of Lionel Wendt, capped with an excerpt from a revelatory essay

- Shanay Jhaveri

Lionel Wendt was born in Colombo in 1900 into the Burgher community, a tiny minority in Ceylon descended from Dutch and Portuguese colonialists. He came from a privileged background and had studied law and classical music in London, at the Inner Temple and the Royal Academy of Music respectively. Wendt learned a lot during his time in Europe, where he familiarized himself with the modern movements in painting. He was also drawn to English, American and French literature from the late Romantic poets to modernists such as Marcel Proust, Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, James Joyce and Paul Verlaine. Wendt consciously chose to return to Ceylon in 1924 which has been acknowledged as a ‘commencement of his adult professional life but also suggests a commitment to his country and an eagerness to intervene in its society, art and culture.’

(…) Having nurtured an interest in photography as a child, Wendt would only formally take up the medium himself in 1932-33. He would first use a Rolleiflex, eventually trading that in for a Leica. Wendt soon determined that his treatment and investigation of the medium would be distinct from what were the then-accepted professional and aesthetic standards of 19th-century photographic practices that either portrayed Ceylon in picturesque or ethnographic terms.