Thinking with the camera

The British Council presents "Commen- taries on Living II" - a black and white photographic exhibition by Angelo de Mel from February 18 to 20 at the British Council hall from 9.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. daily.

Angelo de Mel was born in 1939, just at the onset of the second world war.

He has vague recollections of those turbulent times, and can well remember the granting of Independence to Ceylon at Independence Square in 1948. Growing up in the fifties, he says, was very pleasant, as the country was then virtually a paradise compared to now. He acquired a love of nature and of people, and this is reflected in his photographic work. He began using a box camera, which in later life turned into a Leica and Nikon.

He became movie mad too at about this time and, teaming up with a group of schoolmates equally infected with the movie bug, in 1956 produced the first ever children's film in Sri Lanka. This film called 'Vanagata Kolla', was premiered at the YMBA Hall in Borella. It was first shot in 8mm and later in 16mm with magnetic sound. The imports curb that soon followed put a stop to their movie efforts, and he returned to still photography and participated in photo exhibitions, both national and international.

His photographs during this period were exhibited in Brazil, England and Finland.

The idea of presenting a philosophical idea through the medium of photography came naturally to him over the years, and he began striving in his photographs, as a reviewer of his work once put it, "to present a mundane visual experience in a philosophical light, thereby elevating the photograph to the realm of thought and feeling; a way of thinking with the camera". It was with this theme in mind that he presented his first solo exhibition in 1994, at the Alliance Francaise, Colombo which was entitled "Commentaries on Living", a title he borrowed, naturally enough, from Krishnamoorthy, the Indian philosopher. The late novelist James Gunawardane wrote in the Observer that "Angelo had an excellent insight into human attachments and conflicts", another said in the Dinamina, that the whole exhibition was a suitable theme for meditation. In 1995, he presented an exhibition on disabled children in homes entitled "We are also your children".

The present exhibition entitled "Commentaries on Living II" seeks to present the panorama of life from birth to death, with interpretations of the individual photographs drawn from various literary sources or from religious texts. All photographs are unposed and direct, and taken from life as it happens, freezing a moment of existence as it were, to comment on it. In this way he is closer to the great Cartier Brasson, who believed in the "decisive moment", than to the pictorial photographers such as Ansel Adamson and Edward Weston, all of whose photographs he greatly admires. He hopes one day, to "hold a candle to them".

More Plus * Their memories in black and white

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