Using Eiffel Tower to put a new spin on an old theme
The Eiffel Tower is in a playful mood in Kumar De Silva’s black and white photographs. It peeks over the head of a brooding statue and forms an unexpectedly sharp point to a frothy fountain; though we see only tantalizing glimpses of the sun streaming through giant struts or the pinnacle above the trees it remains instantly recognizable. But for someone who spent so much time photographing it, Kumar was not always its biggest fan. In that he has something in common with the French writer Guy de Maupassant.
Kumar De Silva. Pic by Nilan Maligaspe
“Guy de Maupassant disliked it so much that he is supposed to have frequently lunched and dined at the ET restaurant so that he could take in the views of Paris without the ET,” Kumar tells the Sunday Times. In fact, when the one-time host of the show Bonsoir landed in Paris in the spring of 1986, he was still an “impressionable young television journalist on training in France.”
Looking up at the Eiffel Tower he could admire it for the sheer scale of the technical accomplishment it represented, but that didn’t stop him from thinking it a “very ugly montage of metal.” (The one thing he will concede is the view from the tower is spectacular.) You may think he has changed his mind and he has, but only a little. The tower has now graduated to the status of being a good prop.
“I’m doing a new spin on an old hacked theme. The ET has been there for years…I use it purely as a ‘prop’.” For Kumar, the lure of the iconic landmark is in all the activity it draws to it. “That’s what I’ve tried to capture – from the much visited toilets, the numerous statues around it and people posing for photographs, to police surveillance, reflections on glass panels and the vociferous interplay of shades of gray in the Parisian sky.” Determined to work for the perfect shot, Kumar has also played with perspective – “There are times when one has to get horizontal, crouch, kneel, tiptoe, bend, slant, creep under, etc etc. I’ve had my fair share of them,” he says ruefully.
For someone with two exhibitions already under his belt and a fourth planned for next year, Kumar is surprisingly reluctant to call himself a professional photographer. Instead he emphasises that his equipment is very simple, very basic and that his intention is to replicate exactly what the eye sees. “Although I wish I did, my eyes don’t have mega zooms and multiple lenses. You see exactly what my eyes have seen in their ‘raw’ form,” he explains, “I must however add that I pay painful and minute attention to framing and composition.” He’s a little disgruntled by the last, believing that it has taken some of the pleasure of simply “loafing” around France.
Kumar also made the choice to keep his 30 images (culled from a set of 300) in black and white. He attributes this to an old preference, nurtured through his years as a television producer when all he dealt with was one colour image after the other. He marks as his turning point the encounters with the great French black and white photographers Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Doisneau. “I like the almost tangible feel of the shades of gray which get even grainier and thus more tactile in darker light. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in my photographs,” he says.
The exhibitions have been a wonderful addition to the portfolio of a well-recognised and proud Francophile, for Kumar’s association with the country stretches across a quarter of a century. He and was honoured last October with the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters) from the Government of France. He remains a household name from his Bonsoir TV programme and is also the author of ‘Irangani’ (on the life and times of screen icon Irangani Serasinghe) and ‘The Bonsoir Diaries’.
The Alliance Francaise de Kotte presents Nostalgie 03: The Eiffel Tower Unplugged by Kumar de Silva at the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery on October5 and 6 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. -S.D.
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