Saturday, 7 December 2013 00:00
-
- {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
The art of nature photography has in recent years, thanks largely to advances in digital-camera technology, reached an ever-widening body of practitioners. While seasoned professionals regularly publish weighty tomes brimming with images, any one of which us ordinary mortals would give an arm and a leg to have taken, an increasing number of young people too, have joined their number, presenting us with depictions of the wild, weird and wonderful wealth of Sri Lankan nature.
The most recent among these are Dimitri Goonewardena and Ashvini Jayatilake, now aged 19 and 15, respectively. Dimitri, an undergraduate in Economics and Finance at the University of Melbourne, first teamed up with Ashvini, a student of Musaeus College, in 2010 when the duo held a joint exhibition of their work at the Lionel Wendt. Now, three years and several trips to Yala later, they have combined their best images in a 136-page book, Growing in the Wild.
The book was launched on Wednesday at the Atrium, Cinnamon Grand, with Rohan Pethiyagoda and Prof. Sarath Kotagama addressing the gathering, followed by a vote of thanks delivered by Ashvini.
The photographs by Dimitri and Ashvini, taken mostly in Yala, comprise a selection of charming pictures of the wildlife that characterises Sri Lanka’s dry zone. They demonstrate how a couple of keen teenagers could gainfully occupy their holidays and spare time, honing their skills in what is coming to be an increasingly challenging art.
In the three decades that have passed since Nihal Fernando first established the genre with his Sri Lanka: the wild, the free, the beautiful in 1986, a plethora of competent shutterbugs has produced several dozen coffee-table volumes of increasingly impressive scope. Dimitri and Ashvini have, by the publication of this book, made clear their aspiration to join that number.
Both photographers have won numerous prizes and awards already, including the Junior Wildlife Photographer of the Year (Sri Lanka) competition and the Yala Village Nature Photographer Competition, with Ashvini having contributed some of her photos also to Moments of Truth (2008), a volume published by her father Chitral Jayatilake, well known as one of Sri Lanka’s most outstanding nature photographers.
As the celebrated wildlife photographers Jonathan and Angela Scott write in their foreword to Growing in the Wild, “For those who already know Sri Lanka, this book will prove a vivid reminder of what an extraordinary country it is. And for those yet to journey there, it will act as a wake-up call to add the island paradise to their ‘must-see’ destinations. You won’t be disappointed. Knowing that there are budding young conservationists and photographers like Ashvini and Dimitri to help remind us of what we stand to lose gives us reason for hope.”
Pix by Krishan Ranasinghe
