A journey and love affair between land and lad
View(s):When starry-eyed photographer and city boy Tavish Gunasena headed to Arugam Bay it opened up a new horizon, and his exhibition, Scrubland: East Coast Essays, is a result of a mission to go beyond mere beauty
By Yomal Senerath-Yapa
Beware of expecting beaches, jungle glades and leopards and bears when you walk into Tavish Gunasena’s latest photo exhibition, ‘Scrubland: East Coast Essays’. Here, beauty is not classic; it is subverted purposely. It’s different from the romantic photographs of the Magul Maha Vihara’s ancient statues by the beach, Bambaragastalawa with its reclining colossal cave Buddha in the jungles or the silhouette of a lone leopard in the sand dune beaches at dusk…
Looking deeper and deeper: Encounters with people
Here instead, are more faithful reflections of that coast: weather-beaten leather-skinned villagers, a giant termite mound worshipped by rural devotees because a cobra has taken refuge in it, a man silhouetted against his own fishing net cast wide – rather unusual angles, where there is so much to ‘read’.
The giant termite mound worshipped by rural devotees because a cobra has taken refuge in it
To begin with, Tavish confesses, he himself was pretty much the starry-eyed ‘picturesque’ photographer, starting with the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone he was given at 15, when he was a boy at Asian International School. After high school, for one gap year he shadowed a photographer from the Sunday Times. While photojournalism itself turned out not a vocation that appealed to him, the stint took this ‘city boy’ to Arugam Bay…
Tavish was enchanted by the wild beauty and ancient history of Digamadulla. His aunt who ran a chic bar at Arugam Bay, hired him for a season, and so began a love affair between land and lad.
The exhibition is the result of more than a dozen years’ dedication. While he clicked away blithely with no plan in his head – “just bearing witness” – much later, sorting through the pictures, he was able to “wrestle a story” out of them – the story now told on the Barefoot Gallery’s walls.
Tavish is on a self-proclaimed crusade against the reduction of Sri Lanka’s image to sanitized “tea estates, misty mountains and the glorious Nine-Arched bridge”. A pivotal message he beams out is that we must be more responsible in how we depict our island as the world is getting more interested in us touristically- “look deeper and deeper”.
Tavish believes that more people have to see our island moving away from the mere picturesque; “beneath the superficial layer of what you see, there’s much more if you care to dig”.
Over the years, Tavish would foray from Arugam Bay northwards and southwards on his scooter looking for nooks and crannies hallowed by ancient princes or timeless nature but mostly the unexpected. The scooter was not the most suitable of conveyances, as you can’t “make a U-turn in a jiffy” on it, and he was exposed to the wildlife which took to the roads at dawn or dusk, especially elephants.
While he had no “real mission”, those years at Arugam Bay proved to be a quest for his identity. Having spent all his early life in Colombo it was at Arugam Bay he discovered what it meant to be a Sri Lankan, and also what it meant to be an islander, given the eternal symbiosis with the sea. While exploring the landscape, he says he was also exploring his own inner self.
Tavish’s photographic exhibition at the Barefoot Gallery. Pix by Akila Jayawardena
While the exhibition is part of his soul’s craving, he also does fashion photography as commercial work and has collaborated with Vogue – photos that shatter gender norms and conventional notions of colour…
Tavish Gunasena’s ‘Scrubland: East Coast Essays’ is on at the Barefoot Gallery until December 13.
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