Lionel Wendt : Ceylon

N. van Banning, S. Jhaveri, S. Sanders

Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt's (1900-1944) choice of subject was eclectic: from sensual and homo-erotic portraits to tropical images of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and from picturesque scenes to compositions for which he used modernistic stylistic devices and experimental techniques. After his premature death in 1944 his negatives were destroyed, but his prints resurfaced in the 1990s, and are now part of several international private and museums collections. This year Wendt's work will be exhibited at Documenta in Athens, and a large scale retrospective will take place in the summer of 2017 at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam.