The one that got away – Ruvin de Silva
A.S.H. Smyth interviews the actor, director and documentary photographer on the greatest shot he never got... and one he did
In 2007, aged 21, and working as a cash-teller at HSBC, Ruvin de Silva began rehearsals for his first play, Chatroom, and ‘at every single rehearsal, there was this guy with this massive black camera’, unlike anything he’d seen on anyone before. That man was Deshan Tennekoon (‘The One That Got Away’, Sunday July 19).
Promptly bitten by this second artistic bug, de Silva started borrowing cameras from friends, opened a Facebook album titled ‘How to Steal a Camera’, and eventually was able to buy a low-end Nikon D60 ‘dirt cheap’, with some money that his grandmother had given him. ‘And it was black!’
Two weeks later, he dropped it in the Barefoot pond. But since then, he’s run photography workshops for children at the Galle Literary Festival, collaborated in an art-and-music charity project in Kilinochchi, shot Red Bull stuntmen, photographed theatre, been a finalist in the Fashion Asia Awards, and undertaken longterm commissions for several international agencies.
The one that got away
‘I’ve always had this big cinematic, theatrical thing in my head, wanting to play roles, so I’ve often ended up kind of creating small scenes, as though from stories, and photographing them.
This was a date, though. By that time I would always have a camera with me, and was known to be this ‘photographer guy’ and was just always taking pictures. Anyway, it happened to be this amazing date (says me!), and we went to the beach somewhere in Mount Lavinia, one of those beach-bar spots, and we started drinking beer, and I remember there was this moment, both of us were sitting on those beach chairs, and then we looked at each other, and we started making out, the breeze was just right, her hair was flying, the sun was setting into the sea, this golden gleam – and then I suddenly realised there was this family right behind us, with kids. I’m trying to kiss this girl, but I can also see this mother trying to turn her children’s faces away!
I still remember this perfect light. This beautiful subject. And then also this sub-subject, of a very Sri Lankan family – they’ve just come to enjoy their evening at the beach, y’know – spluttering, why are they kissing, this is Sri Lanka, you should not be doing this kind of thing, my kids are here!
I do zone out quite a bit. Like, “Gimme a second: I just have to go and change the iTunes.” But I wish I had just stepped away and taken that picture – even just before it, or just after – just to capture that scene, because I still remember it being so good, so perfect, and also really funny. But I was way too in the moment.
I have many other pictures of that girl throughout our relationship: just not that one. She’s still part of my world, sort of. She’s married, and things like that... The one that got away!’
The shot that he got
‘This is a photo from the earliest days of my Flickr account, perhaps about 2008. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’d have uploaded it; but in that moment clearly I must just have felt something.
It has so much drama in it. This guy with his arm out, stopping the traffic. Or maybe that’s just what I want to think. Is he just turning? There don’t seem to be many other cars around. And these guys with the pipe: are they going after the dog, or is that a coincidence? Then this man wearing his Korn T-shirt – which is something that I only noticed last night. “Korn! I used to listen to them...!”
Honestly, though, I have no memory of taking this photo at all. I don’t even know where it was. Somewhere in Colombo? Afternoon, for sure – because I never woke up early back then! And shot from far away, maybe through a windscreen or something, and I’ve probably cropped it, which is why you can see the grain.
It’s definitely not even a picture that I’d wanted to get that day. This is B-roll, essentially. I would have been out shooting something else, some tree or some person, and this would’ve just happened right in front of me. I don’t know if I’m constructing this all in my imagination now, but this doesn’t seem like a situation in which you could have said “Oh, this guy is gonna hit the dog, lemme take a picture.”
I wish I could remember what happened immediately afterwards, though. If I went and spoke to these guys, or saved the dog, or...
So I do have the picture – but I don’t have the story. Really, I like the fact that we can reimagine a whole story just from looking at it.’