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“Traveller, there is no path. You have to find your own.”
The line on the frontispiece of Nihal Fernando’s book, “Sri Lanka – a Personal Odyssey,” is typical of the author, as much as it characterises, at both literal and figurative levels, the life he led. Sri Lanka’s most famous wildlife and nature photographer, the proprietor of Studio Times, passed away in his home in Colombo on Monday aged 87.

Nihal Fernando

A labour of love
To describe Nihal as a ‘photographer’ would be an understatement. Although it was in that field of work that he made a living, in this digital era where photography seems to have morphed into an exercise in computer manipulation of images for the greater part, such a description would only remotely correspond to the things this man did with his skills. As the several Studio Times publications will show, his work was a labour of love, an impassioned plea for the conservation of Sri Lanka’s vanishing natural and cultural heritage, an attempt to leave a record of its magical beauty for posterity. Interwoven with the high quality art photography that found expression in the glossy pages of coffee-table books was a distress signal of sorts, to any who may care, about the environmental degradation he witnessed during his travels across the length and breadth of the country.

The element of socio-political criticism implicit in his photographic work was articulated in the Preface to ‘Odyssey’ (1996) where he said: “… What do we find today? A people whose genetic resilience has worn thin, whose children have become links in a consumerist-dominated economic chain, where modes of development dictated by transnational corporations and international financial agencies throttle and imperil indigenous choices … All geographical and political boundaries are on the point of disappearance or are being forced to disappear as globalization becomes a fact of life in the final triumph of the Market.”

Pessimism
A sense of foreboding and at times despair runs through the books like an undercurrent, despite the lush visual beauty of the flora and fauna that form their subject-matter. But the author’s pessimism is tempered with characteristic dry humour. In the same Preface he wrote:

“In my previous book, ‘The Wild, the Free, the Beautiful’ a decade ago, I confessed to having lost every skirmish to keep this island so. I continue to do so — the sanctity of our catchment areas has been violated, elephants fed a sugar-coated pill to desertification, waterfall to be dehydrated by foreigners who consider their own waterfalls holy, forest cover dwindling with added export crops – all in all an all-encroaching environmental disaster with even the healing rays of the sun becoming lethal. I have now given up all hope and feel much better.”

Eppawela
But this was before Eppawela. Nihal Fernando’s biggest triumph on the environmental activism front was in 2000 when he, along with fellow environmentalists, scientists, religious leaders and trade unionists (including the late Bala Tampoe) won the battle to secure the Eppawela rock phosphate deposits from being exploited (and exhausted) by the US transnational corporation Freeport MacMoran.

The long-running campaign came into the full glare of the media spotlight when some 7,000 farmers and other activists held a massive demonstration in front of the Fort Railway Station. In the case known as ‘Bulankulama v Ministry of Industrial Development’ the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favour of six residents and a Buddhist monk of Anuradhapura district, who pleaded in their fundamental rights application that the project would adversely affect their lands and livelihood.

The late R K W Goonesekara appeared for them, free. Ruana Rajepakse, a lawyer in the team, observed later in a newspaper article that the landmark status of the case was indicated “even in the Sri Lanka Law Reports whose editors usually style cases only by the names of the parties but on this occasion added in brackets the words “Eppawela Case.”

The legacy
As part of their efforts to advance conservation Nihal and Studio Times have, over decades, built up an invaluable archive of photographic material that documents sites of historical and archeological significance, monuments and cultural treasures. Exhibitions of these photos never failed to amaze the viewer. Sometimes the pictures were accompanied by detailed text, adding to their public-education value.

The Studio Times team would often take paths off the beaten track in order to reach otherwise inaccessible nooks and corners of the country. The most recent book, ‘Eloquence in Stone – the Lithic Saga of Sri Lanka’ (2008) refers to how many remote sites were found desecrated and broken into by treasure seekers, and may soon be lost forever. A monumental work, and the most ambitious so far, ‘Eloquence’ uses Sri Lanka’s heritage of stone artistry to tell the story of the rise and fall of its ancient civilization. Nihal wrote: “This is the dream I have had for the last fifteen years. I want to tell the story of this country and its people. I want to make people think about our past and what we are doing to it before it is too late.”

Since he was a man who fought shy of publicity, photographs of him are hard to come by. The intriguing picture that appears on the cover of ‘Odyssey’ perhaps gives a glimpse into the nature of this laid-back, genial soul. The photo is of a shadow, probably of the author, as he turned around to photograph his own trail of footprints in the sand. As I wrote in a review of the second edition of that book in the Daily News of 17.11.04: “And what could be more ephemeral than a footprint, a shadow? If freezing the transitory moment, poetically, on film, is what Nihal Fernando does best, then this signature photo sums it up well.”

In Sri Lanka’s photographic community Nihal Fernando had iconic status. He was a legend in his own time. That legend will live on in Studio Times, with Nihal’s daughter Anu Weerasuriya and her husband Chris Silva who inherit the legacy of his life and work.