From hobby to veteran

Work apart it is with a lot of passion that Mr. De Livera reverts to his pet subject – photography and the Photography Society of Sri Lanka.

He is the senior-most member of this 109-year-old society founded in 1906 to promote photography as a hobby, art and craft and now guides its destinies as its Patron.

His journey behind the lens and the society’s history seem to be inextricably-linked. We learn that the society had been set up as the Amateur Photographic Association of Ceylon by Henry Lorenz Wendt, father of the famous Sri Lankan photographer, artist and musician Lionel Wendt. Later it had been renamed and revamped in 1934 by Lionel Wendt with like-minded people. Those whose contributions that have made the society what it is today include P.J.C. Durrant, B.G. Thornley, Joe De Livera, B.P. Weerawardena and D.C.L. Amarasinghe who would meet at Wendt’s home to pore over and discuss at length the images captured by them.

Mr. De Livera launches into technical details of the cameras cradled by him over the years, starting with the Kodak Brownie Box, then a Kodak Folding Camera which was an improvement on the Brownie as it had a lens with a variable aperture and shutter and later a Rolleiflex. Next it was the Leica which he purchased in Zurich, Switzerland, while on a trip to Europe with his father after he had seen Thornley sporting one and he had read about “this revolution” in photography which could produce the 35-mm film format.

“It was BG (Thornley), as he was known, who introduced the Leica to me although it was Lionel Wendt who first introduced 35-mm photography and the Leica to Ceylon some time before World War II,” says Mr. De Livera in a piece written by R.H. Samarakone, himself a member of the society in ‘Legends’, a series in the society’s newsletters featuring senior members.

“It was after BG brought his Leica II to Ceylon that photographers like me realized the potential of this incredible camera and the 35mm format which later caught on like wild fire,” he adds.

Among the very important persons who purchased a Leica was Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake who joined Mr. De Livera on sojourns around the country clicking snapshots in the 1950s which the latter would develop and print in his darkroom, as he had begun film-processing in a 35mm developing tank brought back from England in 1947. Experimenting with the Leica, he had also found that it could be used for ‘Macro Photography’, samples of which he shows us in his study.

Realizing that 35-mm cameras were not available in the country, Mr. De Livera had imported and distributed through Titus Stores the Balda camera from Germany in 1955 which was “relatively cheaper” than the Leica, with one of his first customers being visionary science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Technicalities flow forth on how Mr. De Livera, much later in the 1990s switched to Digital Photography with an Olympus 1.4 Mega Pixel Camera and more recently a Canon SX 20 IS.

A fitting tribute is paid to Mr. De Livera by Mr. Samarakone when he states: “Keeping abreast with the development of camera technology and having used many of the top of the range equipment of each era, he is one of the very few of the senior photographers who took up digital photography at an early stage of its intro- duction in 1995. Having experimented with various types and styles of photography, he is considered as one who excelled in macro photography in the early days.”

Next he touches on the nomadic lifestyle of the Photographic Society until it found a home at the Lionel Wendt Art Centre, having travelled full circle.

The early meetings of the society were held on the first Monday of the month at Lionel Wendt’s house on Guilford Crescent, says Mr. De Livera, who had joined the society, on the invitation of Quintus Fernando, a university lecturer, a few months after the death of Wendt in 1944. The meetings continued there even after the death of Wendt until the old house was demolished to make way for the Art Centre.

It was then that the society moved from place to place, gathering in a small room behind the Planters’ Association of Ceylon (the current premises of the Cinnamon Grand Hotel) on Galle Road, moving out when the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation took over this premises; homeless for awhile; then the Young Men’s Christian Association in Fort; thereafter Mr. De Livera’s Dad’s residence, ‘Rendlesham’ down Stafford Place (now known as Sri Vipulasena Mawatha), Colombo 10; and finally a permanent home in the newly-built Lionel Wendt Art Centre.

Giving his input during the construction phase, it had been Mr. De Livera who suggested a solution to the lack of ventilation in the society’s meeting hall, a line of windows at the top around 15 feet from the ground which could be opened and closed by fixing a thick string. “These are still there,” he adds.