In ‘Bridge to Lanka’, experimental photographs reimagine a turbulent island

A sailboat returns at the ebb of a tide; a copper toned photograph with a coarse, grainy texture, perhaps an effect of time. Look closer, two figures appear on this boat, crouched, in anticipation, seeking the refuge of the shore – but are yet to arrive. The image lingers at this interstice, suspended. Lionel Wendt’s (1900-44) gelatin silver print, Sailing a boat (1933-44), anchors the affective registers of this exhibition, wherein each visual is consciously ambiguous, abstract even, despite the seemingly empirical (or positivist) mode of making: photography. At the very onset, Wendt resists imperial histories of the camera, formerly used as an ethnographic tool to document, classify and reduce colonised populations and landscapes into ‘objective’ data patterns. Such documentary photography suffocated its subjects, their potentialities and thus, the medium itself; whereas in contrast, Wendt’s compositions push viewers into the interiority of his protagonists – often native Sri Lankan communities in the 1930s – for they appear exposed, vulnerable, yet at the same time, strangely inscrutable.

Not much is known about Wendt’s relationship with his models or subjects. Perhaps the beauty of his photographs lies in this inscrutability, with each protagonist anonymous and withdrawn, whilst simultaneously holding a multitude of lived possibilities. For instance, in a portrait of a man with delicate, beautiful flowers, the man does not meet your gaze. A nude male figure looks away while holding an outstretched vetti, a traditional loincloth, as the curvature of his shoulders echoes the arch behind him in a surreal composition. Next to him, a different print captures a meticulously groomed young man, but with faint, unexpected traces of perspiration. On a parallel wall, a photograph reveals the outline of a man, absolutely still, set against the turbulent ocean waters, at the edge of a cliff. Wendt photographed Ceylon, a colonised Sri Lanka, at the cusp of historical transformation. But his images appear timeless, for the artist strove to capture fleeting traces of identity itself, in flux, untethered, in order to grasp what it meant to belong to (and desire in) a land yet to attain autonomy, or a coherent sense of self.

Wendt’s portraits with queer sexual undercurrents were created in the 1930s, at a time when homosexuality was outlawed by British colonisers, an injunction set in place since 1885. Wendt approaches the body sensitively and with rigour, deeply mindful of both composition and light. He experimented extensively with photography, at times, reversing tonalities by exposing partially developed prints to a flash of light, pushing the medium and image towards potentialities unseen by the human eye. There’s an immediacy in his photographs and compositions, but his protagonists remain a cipher: distant, despite an intimate encounter. Thus his archive becomes unstable, tense, shifting in and against linear time; for instance, with the curation at Jhaveri Contemporary, the shadows of his subjects somehow appear to move, magnified and enchanted, stepping outside of their frames, into life-sized coloured prints on the gallery walls. Except what you see here are no longer Wendt’s photographs, or subjects, but a series created in 2024.

Cassie Machado’s When Colours Return Home to Light (2024) is the artist’s imagined collaboration with Wendt, as two photographers, born nearly 80 years apart, exhume estranged textures of the self. In this series, Machado builds upon a novel technique – of the photogram – formerly pioneered by Lionel Wendt. Photograms are images of light captured on a surface without an intermediary apparatus (i.e. a camera). Or perhaps, put differently, the entire studio transforms into a camera, as the subject is captured directly on light sensitive paper, through the exposure of an external source of light. Machado’s dream-like silhouettes tangibly capture the absence of their subjects, their shadowy vestige, in striking tones. She depicts members of the South and Southeast Asian diaspora for this body of work, inviting them to her studio in Paris, where the portraits are created. Their subtracted gestures draw instinctual, graceful connections with Wendt’s portraits, whilst simultaneously foregrounding the passage of time. In When Colours Return Home to Light, a temporal spillage captures your gaze, rendered in rust toned stains; as a result of the exposure time, the subject grows inside the image, inscribing a past to its future possibilities.

How do you capture the essence of an identity – individual or collective – in the midst of ceaseless instability, entrenched in sectarian conflict? For Machado and Wendt, speculations on the ‘self’ find an anchor not on determined ground, or a place, but rather, in their absences, in the longing for one. On the other hand, Vasantha Yogananthan’s project A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) reckons with identity formations through mythology, specifically the Ramayana, an ancient Indian epic text written in stages between the seventh and third centuries BCE. From 2013 to 2019, Yogananthan travelled from north to south India, retracing the coordinates of the epic’s heroes and researching the ways in which mythical narratives impact our ways of seeing the world. Looking at fiction and fantasy, he photographed the lived realities of the people he encountered along his journey. Yogananthan, too, negates the evidentiary thread of photography, as he revealed in an interview with the British Journal of Photography, “I realised the distinction between truth and falsehood wasn’t important. This was an important discovery for me, that this is where my photographs should lie – in this in-between world between physical reality and the imagined.”

Yogananthan turns into a storyteller, re-enchanting the epic of Rama, Sita and Ravana and their fantastical tales, rendered in contemporary times through ordinary individuals and landscapes. Looking For Love (2018) captures a fisherman, standing on the shore in Mannar (in Kerala), as he untangles his nets, searching for the day’s catch. Yogananthan’s poetic imagery likens this visual to the chapter of Ramayana in which Rama searches for Sita, his wife, who had been abducted by the Lankan king, Ravana. And in his frame, the grandeur of Rama’s narrative diffuses to reveal a tender, rather banal moment, of longing in the absence of love. Such unusual compositions and (imagined) dialogues between Yogananthan, Machado and Wendt, when woven together, forge a rare image of vulnerability, loss and desire, in an island plagued by historical violence.

‘Bridge to Lanka’ is on view at Jhaveri Contemporary till 23 August, 2024.