The one that got away – David Blacker
‘Stormy Veddah’ by David Blacker
David Blacker is a former soldier, novelist and ad man who now works as a writer and photographer – though not, he laments, too often both together.
Having started, on the side, while still in advertising, his characteristic photo essays – what he terms ‘ethnographic, documentary and travel photography’ – featured predominantly in the national travel magazine Explore Sri Lanka, and SriLankan Airlines’ in-flight mag, Serendib.
Since going full-time freelance in 2018, Blacker’s images have appeared in The New York Times, Outlook India, and – through the Polaris Images agency (also New York), in the aftermath of last year’s Easter bombings – in newspapers from Sweden to China. His photo of the Temple of the Tooth was featured in Dorling Kindersley’s 2019 Manmade Wonders of the World. Much of this work can be seen via his online persona, ‘Son of the Morning Light’.
He came to me ‘fresh’ from a food shoot which had over-run; his next gig, a likely property portfolio near Bandarawela.
The one that got away
‘I’d finished early on an assignment in Anuradhapura, and was driving back past Ritigala to my accommodation. The sky was heavily overcast, like it was about to rain, and I had this idea that the place would look really good in black and white, in this kind of sulphurous light. So I was just planning to rush up there and back down, and take some shots before it got too dark.
The site is sort of this sprawl of buildings up a hill through a strict nature reserve. You go along these flagstone walkways, surrounded by fairly close jungle, and every now and then you come to these large double-platform clearings, littered with ruined stone pillars, and you’ve got perhaps a hundred metres across to the treeline on the other side. It’s very stark.
It was once a monastery for this particular sect of Buddhist monks, the Pansukulikas, who were ascetics whose habits were traditionally scavenged from cemeteries and so forth, so they never wore the bright orange robes you think of now. Also, there were battles fought in that area, and legends of yakkas – so it really has this quite unusual atmosphere. The place is never crowded at the best of times, but on this occasion I was completely alone.
Then I get to this platform – my camera was hanging on its strap – and I look up, and I just see this movement against the jungle on the other side, this slight patch of brownish, yellowish clothing. I was perfectly placed, exactly at the top of the walkway, dead-centre of the platform, everything’s symmetrical, and he’s directly opposite me, this solitary monk, at the other end of the clearing, against the backdrop of 180° of dark green jungle. Even in black and white, it would have made for an amazing contrast. I grabbed for my camera – down, up: all of a couple of seconds – and when I looked up he had disappeared. I walked across there quickly, but already there was no sign of him!
You always think about the shots you miss. I’ve been to Ritigala again, with my son, and we came up to that same platform, and I was poised with the camera… but obviously he isn’t gonna be there. That shot is gone. Sometimes I wonder if I imagined it.’
The shot that he got
‘I was doing a shoot for this hotel in Kandy. The idea was to feature the places that you could stroll to around the city – so we were doing a photo story of these two girls, in semi-candid kind of shots, with the theme of one of them showing a friend around her home town.
We spent days walking around the city centre, shooting these naturalistic pictures on the street, by the lake, in the night market, turning a few heads; but also it was raining, and there were random people constantly barging into our shots, so there were a lot of not-particularly-photogenic moments.
And then we were doing this shot close to the Temple of the Tooth, of the girls walking down this paved road beside one of the Hindu hathara devales. We’d done it a couple of times, and I was just sending them back around the corner to reset, and as they start walking away from the camera this Veddah dude just comes marching down, barefoot, axe over his shoulder, the whole lot. I’ve never seen anything like that in Kandy; but he just walks straight through the middle of the photograph, past these hot professional models, and after a moment it registers with one of them… and so she turns to watch him, and I just snapped this single shot.
In the end, the picture wasn’t even used; but I did put it up online, and it is easily my most viewed photo. Somebody even made a Sinhalese meme of it, in fact!’