WITH THE DAWN - A REVIEW BY NEVILLE WEERARATNE, Sunday Island

A review of With the dawn by Neville Weeraratne
A passionate affair with wild life
I have been in many minds as to whether it is appropriate for me to comment on this collection of wild life photography by the doyen of wild life photographers, Nihal Fernando; and the running commentary by one I can only describe as a kindred spirit, Herbert Keuneman.
My problem has been compounded by the fact that I was invited to write an introductory note for the book on these two paragons of their craft. But what I did say were generalisations, portraits of Nihal and Herbert painted with a very broad brush indeed. However, it is not possible to allow the publication of a book of this order to go unnoticed; hence, what follows.
The enjoyment of wild life is not universal. It is, I suppose, as much a matter of taste as it is of love. I have known people who have been bored out of their wits at the thought of a fleeting glimpse of a leopard as it slinks into the undergrowth, or at the long, inevitable wait to see a herd of elephants gamboling in a water-hole. Such revelations of beauty are, perhaps, the preserve of a privileged elite, a bourgeois past-time for the idle rich to indulge in? I think not. I believe that an appreciation of all forms of life in its natural setting is an essential facet of the total, civilised human being.
And the patience, the taste, the sheer devotion to such a pursuit is an expression of the highest art, nothing less than an act of worship.
‘With the Dawn’ then, is a sacred text in which Nihal pays homage to all manner of creatures, some great and others small. His eye has ever been open to all the wonders of our world. It has always been selective and discriminating, and by cautiously choosing those images alone that express this sense of wonder he has made many, perhaps thousands of photographs that are profound and exceptional. Consider Nihal’s 1986 publication, ‘The Wild, The Free, the Beautiful’, or the much later and more comprehensive ‘Sri Lanka: a Personal Odyssey’ (1997).
The present publication is based on an exhibition put together by Studio Times and seen at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in 1973. In a note by Anu Weerasuriya (who stakes no claim as its editor), she explains how this collection came about. It begins with Nihal, the photographer and Herbert, his friend, arriving one Sunday morning at the studio. We see them in the act of creating a passionate narrative, Herbert’s eye, just as swift and discerning as Nihal’s, telling the story of a day in the jungle.
The photographs were laid out on the floor and by a process of elimination and of deliberate choice, Herbert designed a sequence of images that was to make up the exhibition. He then composed the written text, often in single, monosyllabic words, brief and unobtrusive, at other times extended to complete the grammar of the experience.
All this is now here in this publication, more than thirty years after they were first seen.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between the dimensions of a photographic print and the inevitable economy of the printed page. The format chosen for ‘With the Dawn’ by its designer, Eranga Tennekoon is 170mm x 180mm, almost a perfect square. Therein lies the problem. It diminishes the impact of the images because, often enough, they have to be reduced to fit into the available space.
There can be no doubt about it: clearly, the bigger the print the greater its impact.
There is also the fact that a photographic print produced in the dark room can be so treated as to obtain certain basic qualities, black and white prints that are the deepest black and the purest white with a range of greys in between. These are qualities which it is the photographer’s prerogative to develop. This is what you would get at an exhibition.
Once this has been achieved and the work is passed on to the printer, the pictures become dependent upon that person’s sensitivities and his technical competence. In the process of reproduction, such being the state of the art, much is lost.
Having said that, the point has to be made that ‘With the Dawn’ is a delight, lovely to see and to hold. It is beautifully designed and presented. It is innovative too, in the plan used by the designer: the publication history and introductory notes are at the end of the book rather than at the beginning, leaving the reader to first encounter the pictures, which is, after all, what the book sets out to show.
The decision of Studio Times to publish this collection of photographs is a wonderful act of faith. It is the certain means by which one of Nihal Fernando’s perennial enthusiasms can be met, his unabated insistence on the need to conserve a sacred inheritance, the wild life of Sri Lanka. I think it is correct to say that Nihal’s devotion to this idea has been his life’s single preoccupation as much as it has been to preserve the bounty of nature as it is manifest in his beloved island, one that survives in the face of an ever-increasing rape of the countryside.
His is a lone voice, like that of the prophet, crying in the wilderness -- but for the appearance of this book. It speaks for like-minded people.

WORDS BY HERBERT KEUNEMAN - EXCERPTS FROM WITH THE DAWN

With the dawn
the birds
awake
and take off
fluttering
gracefully
away
from lakes
and jungle pools ...........
they mount screeching
into the morning sky.


Some watch the fantasies of aerial ballet, others on curled wing labour heavily overhead reaching for far heights in which to soar.


Towards secluded tanks buffaloes press and thunder to plunge and swim.


The Eagle fierce and questing lives always on watch.


Yet even parents
however alert,
watchful
or devoted
nor any small adult
can always avoid
the swoop
the lightning strike
of this proud killer.


Challenge is issue
and answered
while the meeker members stare
or stampede to a safer distance
until the loser
is ousted.


But beyond the bruit of battle normal occupations and pre-occupations continue.


As the sun falls, its light shatters into a million fragments bright as a peacock's tail, gradually fading into a silver spear, and the last bird flies home.

WITH THE DAWN - A REVIEW BY PRASANNA WEERAWARDENE, The Daily Mirror, 11 December 2008

WITH THE DAWN, INNOCENCE REIGNS


“And every sky was blue and rain,
And sudden rainbows in between,
And every bough was green again
And all the world was gilt and green.”
Wild Ceylon, R.L.Spittel


Picture this scene: it is holiday time in a timeless past of Lanka, where conflict was outlined by irate motorists trying to overtake a plodding loaded bullock cart on the quiet streets of Colombo, and violence was when exploding concertinas of firecrackers heralded the New Year. You are packing the car and pouring over the AA map to figure out the best route, and checking the oil and water levels. Someone more responsible has handled the essentials of food and supplies. It is as yet a few hours to dawn, and you are champing to be on the road, to get to those sylvan forest vistas peopled only by species which have had rights of way in Lanka long before humans arrived.

You travel on minor roads, motor past sleepy hamlets, and have breakfast by an ancient waterway now inhabited by lotus and water birds. The road ahead, ever winding, calls you on. By now, Dawn’s pearly light has lit up the east, and the world is stirring. Buffalos emerge from misty rice paddies, and an occasional cyclist meanders on. Green horizons with intermittent hills roll away on either side of the road.

Tribes of birds, mount from trees, reed-beds and islets of sedge flap screeching into empty skies.

You enter a wilderness which is sans human intersections, electricity pylons, microwave towers and all the detritus of our techno lives. A wilderness, which is alive, watchful and unforgiving, in its rigour, against transgressions. Your Gods have no currency here. Your voice is stilled, conversations are in whispers and brevity is key.

You are about to return to an age of innocence, where humans intersected with older habitués of Lanka with mutual respect and a balance was maintained. Where the whispered instructions of the old man crouched next to you above a forest water hole would rule your life for the next hour or so. Where the salt breeze blowing in from southern wastes would knife through you as you watched a thousand whitecaps come storming in on a deserted jungle beach. Where an evening spent overlooking a villu with the long, sustained note of the cicadas as accompaniment, together with the rhythmic moan of the loris, makes you aware of the world around you as never before. You are alive to a million sounds and sights, your eyes glued to your binos as you scan the emerging herds of forest dwellers in front of you. You are in the eternal moment, an observer and creator, as one with the red ant making its way up your legs and with the trickles of sweat coming down your neck. You have attained the Nirvana of the Ceylon traveler. This “emerald isle girdled by sapphire wave”, as the Ramayana describes Lanka, is yours to discover again.

Nihal Fernando has been documenting the wilderness and the passage of Lanka’s original inhabitants through time, for the past 50 years or so. With the dawn is his latest, and perhaps his most poignant offering, considering the context of the time we are in now. In a land beset by conflict and crisis, this is a reminder of what we have forgotten.

Using black and white film is now an almost forgotten skill. It is an art form, that when used by a master, etches into our vision those moments. With the dawn is all black and white, a travelogue through Lanka’s wilderness. The novelist Pico Iyer has called black and white the shade of nostalgia, and perhaps it is this quality which adds another dimension to this book. We all have our memories of the best times of our lives, and for most of us Sri Lankans, our childhoods evoke that time.

The art of nature photography and the art of presenting the fruits of such skills are two very different things. One is not a complement of the other. To show to a wider audience a private and personal perspective of the natural world demands a sharing of the essences of the person who captured that moment. The great photographers such as Ansel Adams, Capa, Bresson, Bailey, Don McCullin, have that eye, which Cezanne-like, capture the world and hold it for eternity.

Nihal, in his years of roaming the hidden byways and forgotten places of this island, has that certain eye. Capturing eternity in a moment he holds, transfigures and changes the world for ever. His partner in this book is Herbert Keuneman, who has added the text, elegant and sparse, to Nihal’s images. Herbert Keuneman’s prose complements the images perfectly, a balanced counterpoint.

Of the great nature writers of old Lanka, R.L Spittel was the most vivid and natural. The current masters of this genre are Peter Mathiessen and George Schaller. Schaller is better known as the world’s greatest Field Biologist who happens to write good books on his adventures. Peter Mathiessen is a great writer who happens to be passionate about nature, Buddhism, Africa, American Indians to name a few.” He is a writer with all the gifts: an exceptional ear, an unequalled eye, a ravenous soul, and a muscular radiance” (Pico Iyer). Add to this the requirement of a lot of space, a lot of wilderness and clean water, and you have the complete naturalist writer. Spittel was an earlier incarnation of Mathiessen, with the same qualities and needs.

Nihal’s camera style is the perfect riposte to Spittel’s prose: lean, spare and rigourous. Looking at his works, one can see the words unwritten forming in our minds. It seems to me that artists of Nihal’s calibre do not come easy in a small country like Lanka. There was a time when we were blessed with a surfeit of world-class artists such as Justin Deraniyagala, Lionel Wendt, coming together at one time. Art then had a rigour and quality which shines through. These diamond days are no more, and what we have now in this new millennium, where everyone is an instant camera expert, are a plethora of mediocrity, where personal pictorial histories are elevated to a global audience through the Net. The medium is no longer the message, but a mess.

In such times as today, Nihal’s images hark back to our timeless past

In his earlier works, such as The Wild the Free the Beautiful, and Sri Lanka - A Personal Odyssey, Nihal opened to the world the rich vein of Lankan imagery he has amassed over the decades. The gossamer filigree of dawn in the Hortons, the solitary Sambhur on the sand dunes of Yala, the head of a young village girl taking a bath, a group of Sambhur doe listening intently for approaching doom, a group of feathery coconut palms, a misted Ruwanveliseya at first light across the Basawak Kulama, these are visual poems in a frame. There is an evolution in his works: Sri Lanka - A Personal Odyssey is epic in scope and execution, a sweeping statement of Lanka’s roots, a portrait of an ancient land with transcendent imagery.

In this book, Nihal does not overtly grasp at the epic sweep of Lanka, but narrows his focus to the daily grind: another day at the office in Lanka’s wilderness, with all the multitudes and solitary players avoiding the pitfalls at work and play. The images which stuck with me are, the swoop of the Sea-Eagle in “lightning strike”, the leopard captured in several frames, stalking, leaping, playing, and with its mate, the Buffalo in a forest river, and the picture which says it all, “Violence and Conflict” where the Elephant and man stare at each other over a fence, stand out. They encapsulate the jungles of Lanka, and the future.

Nihal too is an artist who needs a lot of space, a lot of wilderness, and clean water. These are now in increasing short supply in Sri Lanka. Like Spittel and Mathiessen, Nihal too has an exceptional ear, an unequalled eye, and a ravenous soul. The Lanka he knew may be fast receding as the century advances, but his images remain, and with them, a peerless legacy. With the dawn is to be enjoyed at the end of the day, with some spirited company, and the lights down low, to take you back to that time of innocence, when we were at dawn.


Prasanna Weerawardane

WITH THE DAWN - A REVIEW BY IRANGANI SERASINGHE

Two poets get together
one with the camera and the other with the pen

A review of With the dawn
By Nihal Fernando & Herbert Keuneman
Published by Studio Times Ltd, Dec 2005
ISBN 955-9236-05-9

When I heard that Nihal Fernando was putting out another book of his photographs and that the text was by the late Herbert Keuneman, my first reaction was fantastic! Two poets getting together, one with the camera and the other with a pen, and both with one passion - Sri Lanka. Then a sudden thought struck me. “How come?” It is a long time since Sri Lanka lost this invaluable son of hers - Herbert Keuneman, so chockfull of knowledge of this country, so sensitive to all things beautiful …

Then I was enlightened. These pictures are a selection from Nihal’s 1973 exhibition when he and Herbert had got together and created this lovely poem called With the dawn and it has been tucked away for thirty three years before reaching the printers and you and me.

The cover picture is so soft and gentle that I found myself turning the pages ever so gently as though I was afraid of causing the slightest disturbance by the rude rustling of paper. Page by page I was lifted up and up with the birds from the lake and sedge, from branch and nest, up, up into the awakening day.

And now I am treated to a bird’s eye view of the other denizens of the jungle awakening and starting off on their quest for food and water. Elephants, buffaloes, leopards and bears, sambhur and deer, mongoose and jackal and proud, majestic eagles, all have one fixed purpose - food and water. But now we must come down to earth where all the drama is taking place - the eternal quest for food and water. The eagle swiftly swoops down to take off with a struggling fish, while the leopard, the crocodile, the jackal tear their quarries apart. But this is not an ugly fact in the beautiful poem: this is merely the unerring pattern of Nature. As Herbert Keuneman puts it “the leopard … kills without malice.”

And so we meander quietly through the jungle feeling so much a part of it and yet so much an outsider longing to be one with the jungle.

The sun sets. The day closes. All these pictures taken after hours and years of waiting and watching, waiting and listening, waiting and smelling, are black and white, and of course the hundred in-between greys. I would not have it otherwise. There is restfulness in black and white which colour cannot capture. So the poem flows on ….

By Irangani Serasinghe

WITH THE DAWN BY NIHAL FERNANDO & HERBERT KEUNEMAN. A Review by Lasanda Kurukulasuriya, Sunday Observer, 2nd April 2006

With the dawn :
A poem in black and white

Nihal Fernando & Herbert Keuneman
Published by Studio Times Ltd., December 2005.
Available in Standard (soft cover) and Deluxe editions, at Studio Times, 16/1 Skelton Road, Colombo 5 and leading bookstores.

by Lasanda Kurukulasuriya

"In a world of soul less technology, this is an achievement for which one can say "thank you," said one visitor to the 1973 Studio Times exhibition of wild life photography held at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery.

The remark applies just as well to the book With the dawn, which traces its origins to that event. Perhaps even more so to the book, which comes into print at a time when the digital revolution is transforming what people understand by the word photography.

Measuring just 18cm x 19cm and about one inch thick, this new publication containing 200 black and white photographs from the 'analog era' is a typical Studio Times product - unostentatious and yet packed with punch. It has a very spare text by Herbert Keuneman, which never intrudes, but works in a way that seems to hold the pictures together like an invisible frame.

It is this perfect partnership between words and pictures that makes with the dawn an unusual work. It comes across like a poem, Although Anu Weerasuriya insists there is no attempt here to educate or edify the reader, and that "it's just a beautiful book," with the dawn in fact portrays everything her father Nihal Fernando fought for as a nature lover, patriot and environmental activist.

The pictures are Skill fully compiled in a sequence that tells the story of Sri Lanka's precious wild life, with all its drama and pathos.

It illustrates how, while "the forest is a place of beauty, quietude and uneasy peace, there runs beneath its life a constant counterpoint of conflict and violence." A day in the jungle in the company of these two intrepid authors takes the reader close up to the battles for survival within it, the magnificence of nature, the sadness of death and man-made tragedy.

"The leopard, as savage a killer as any, kills without malice." When the warrior buffalo issues a challenge to its rival, the entire animal kingdom is disturbed. "Always the burden of the generations of young, to be trained to follow in their elders 'footsteps...." But all is not gloom and doom, there are moments of humour too that have not escaped the camera's eye.

There are many examples of this photographer's special gift for freezing the feeling moment - the lightning strike of the eagle, the spring of the leopard, the monkey in mid air leaping from one bough to another.

While some of the prints seem a little grainy, the reader's attention is held at these points by the story element in the text. But this is hardly a fault to find, given the totality of rewarding experience the book has to offer.

In a post-script, Neville Weereratne takes a line from the Handbook of the Ceylon Traveller to describe Nihal Fernando as one who has "travelled the length and breath of this country, seen, heard, experienced and above all, understood the land, its people and their life," adding that this is what defines him to be "the amiable colossus that he is."

No doubt he found the perfect kindred spirit for this venture in Herbert Keuneman, former journalist, teacher and Anglican priest, for whom, we are told, "lifelong residence led to a passionate love for the island." With wild life books having become something of a fashion nowadays, it is this passionate motivation lying behind with the dawn that makes it stand out as the 'genuine article' among a proliferation of coffee-table books.