A blend of photography and music
Sachini Perera booked the hall at the Lionel Wendt before she had even decided which of her photographs she wanted to exhibit. Luckily, the decision proved an easy one. With ‘The Show Must Go On’ Sachini will showcase some of her earliest photographs taken in and around musicians at work. In her pictures heavy metal vocalists growl into the mike and classical violinists lose themselves in their music; drummers drum and guitarists strum while bathed in strobe lights, the audience looks on, fists pumping the air.
Pix courtesy Sachini Perera
Sachini comes from a family of “wildlife fanatics” and her parents will tell you that she first got into photography as a toddler. Their attempts to placate her with a toy camera didn’t work and it wasn’t long before she was using a rudimentary point and shoot, taking pictures like her dad.
Though she would take breaks from photography (one inspired by having to lug kilos of her father’s photography equipment around Pompeii in Italy) Sachini began to rediscover her love of the medium when she started taking pictures at concerts. She says that the images were her attempt to support and encourage the musicians, who at that time weren’t part of the mainstream music scene in Sri Lanka.
Sachini herself has become increasingly invested in photography. She’s graduated from her little point and shoot to a Canon EOS-7D and is slowly adding to her collection of lenses so that she can manage low light situations and wide angle shots. Taking pictures at a gig itself is always a challenge. There’s the technique to be mastered but it helps that Sachini has been for so many shows that she knows her musicians well. For instance, when Stigmata plays Jazz Theory, she knows w exactly when guitarist Tenny will jump in the air; she’s talked classical pianist Eshantha Joseph Peiris into allowing her backstage and has perfected a “poker face” that she puts on just before ploughs through the head banging metal heads to get as close to the stage as she can.
In fact, Sachini has so many pictures that her shortlist for her exhibition has 150 images. Once she’s cut down the list, she’s also looking at innovative ways to present them – including pairing them with music from the concert they were taken at. It’s her way of helping you tap into the energy of the show as well as another way of giving back to the musicians who made the shots possible. Sure to be featured are bands such as Thriloka, Stigmata, Natasha Nathanielsz, Hania Luthufi and many others, including visitors to Sri Lanka’s burgeoning music scene.
Sachini draws a timeline between how some of these bands sprang from relative anonymity to gather a larger following in Sri Lanka and how in the same period she herself expanded her repertoire to include photojournalism, travel photography (both in Sri Lanka and abroad), portraiture and most recently, wedding photography. Having seen her work featured widely in local publications, she was also a part of Women and Media Collective’s annual photography exhibition in 2012, the Center for Poverty Analysis’ exhibition ‘Alternative Views on Development’ in 2011 and the Fearless Poster Collective curated by artist Shilo Shiv Suleman in India in March 2013.
Having worked as a Programme officer at the Women and Medial Collective for the past 6 years, Sachini is interested in using new media in social activism. When she’s not taking pictures of musicians, she is often one of their number – a trained classical musician, she plays the clarinet for the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka.
Now she hopes this exhibition will help introduce her audience to the diversity of Sri Lanka’s musical talent. When she first began taking pictures of Thriloka and Stigmata, there weren’t many others doing the same, but that’s changed. “There are lots of other gig photographers that I very much admire so taking photos at gigs is not in itself something unique anymore,” she says, adding, “it’s always interesting to see our different perspectives on the same gig. I have chosen to exhibit my photos and hopefully that will encourage others to do so – maybe a group exhibition in the future would be a way forward.
”‘The Show Must Go On’ featuring the photographs of Sachini Perera will be held on the June 8-9, 2013 at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in Colombo. Find Sachini online at http://sachinip.wordpress.com and http://www.facebook.com/sachiniphotography
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