The Sunday Times On The Web

17th July 1996

| TIMESPORTS

This is what you are!

by Rajpal Abeynayake

Dominic Sansoni - Snapshots

An exhibition of black and white photographs

July 25 - August '96

Gallery 706

Lionel Wendt was easily the wizard of the portrait. In cold black and white, he dissected the society of his time with effortless ease.

After Wendt, there were others, but not of his calibre. Portraits are in any case dangerous business in a society such as ours. Oliver Cromwell said 'paint me warts and all.' It is not an allowance that Colombo society usually grants. Portraits are by nature minefields. The subjects will not break your limbs; it could be worse.

Disclaimers notwithstanding, "Snapshots" by Domini Sansoni is a bit of a dare by these standards. By reviving the art of the portrait, and being quite matter of fact about it, he impishly gives sleeping souls a wake up call "This is how others see you: tough."

Part of the earlier romance of portrait is recreated, because these snapshots are in black and white. It sounds like a pleasure to ditch the colour. Technicolour takes away from colourful people, such as Manik Sandrasagara and Mahen Vythialingam whose lives are positioned against the cliche in the first place. The gentlemen of a now bygone era such as Neville Weeraratne form an ideal foil for Sansoni's experimental instincts. Weeraratne, a former Features Editor of the Observer, worked at a time when the Lionel Wendt was the centre of the universe. But, the Weeraratne's, bless their souls, also believed that the good ties disappeared with them. In a chat with this writer a few years back, he mused longingly on how there was another life for journalists in the good old days. 'Our jobs were over by four,' he said, "unlike now, and then another life begins at the Arts Center." How could I spoil his fun and tell him that journalists these days have several other lives, not just one?

Life is different of course, and it has to be, and it has to be captured as it is. Dominic is not doing anything here for posterity, though he is turning forty and crossing that imaginary hump on the day Snapshots opens. One gets the impression he is having a lot of fun; makes some of us feel jealous.

The Sansoni's, probably like Wendt in a different era, have a flair for the novel. By converting an old seaside location into a gallery for the arts, Dominic created a noveau Wendt, an arts scene that is a new experience fitting more cosmopolitan minds. Actually, its appropriate, considering that the Lionel Wendt is now a trouble spot, some kind of disputed Eelam of the arts.

The club and the trustees are having a fight, and all that is now old hat.

On a given day at a party at 706, you would probably bump into the new generation, most dressed to the nines maybe, but always a little adventurous. Dominic, in his simplicity says that all he wants to do is to put a smile on these people's faces.

It is not a hard job, because the people you see at 706 are generally beautiful people anyway. But that's not the point. Art has to go on despite the revolution, and somebody has to do the work in spite of the complications. Dominic's pictures speak of a country that still retains its romance while it changes.

Dominic doesn't go searching for the happening, or looking for the earthquake.

But he gets a cross section of a sort, snapping his mischievous looking old aunts and Micheal Ondaatje with a black eye, and then switching to the tired Mr. Pieter Keuneman, and then to fresh faced student monks in Mirissa.

A Wimbledon champion said once that for tennis you need flair, those who try too hard fail miserably. Dominic doesn't try too hard to make a statement. With a pint sized old German Lica, he takes pictures, mostly of people he knows, and not necessarily the big or the famous.

It is probably the best way to capture the passing scene, without making it sound like a big project that burns people at the ears.

Thank God that people still live here. Don't forget to thank Dominic for their portrait.

What a lot to learn from the 'handicapped'

by Vinoth Ramachandra

What can the mentally and physically handicapped teach us? The question surprises people I ask. Handicapped babies are, after all, victims of misfortune, expressions of "bad karma" according to our traditional wisdom. Handicapped children at school are either bullied or pitied. Mentally subnormal adults (for instance, the village idiot) are usually the butt of humour in tele-dramas and films. And the Hon. Minster of Justice is contemplating changing the law on abortion so that foetuses with serious genetic defects can have their lives terminated. In this climate, raising the question of what we "normal" people have to learn from the handicapped or disabled can sound rather ridiculous.

A friend of mine who is a neonatal paediatrician in England told me recently of psychiatric tests of "normal" and handicapped children which bring out interesting differences between their respective mental worlds. When asked, for instance, what they considered most precious to them, the "normal" children replied in terms of objects: toys, games, clothes, TV etc. The handicapped children invariably answered in terms of persons: mother, father, sister, nurse, teacher... I suspect that similar enquiries done in our local context, among children from similar social and economic backgrounds, will reveal more or less the same results. This raises the interesting, and potentially disturbing question: who really are the "normal" children and who are the "handicapped"?

The answer we give will take us beyond medicine. It depends on what we understand by our humanness. Wherein lies our human dignity? Is it measured by intelligence, colour, social "usefulness", material possessions or personal relationships? To use language popularized by the psychologist Erich Fromm, is human personhood a matter of having or of being? And how does the way of being of another affect my own being? No one who has played with mongol (Downs Syndrome) children can go away unmoved by their affectionate natures. One young mother told me of her journey from initial rejection of her mongol baby to feeling pity for those who have "missed" one of the most beautiful and transforming experiences of life in never having to relate to the handicapped. Yet these are among the children whose destruction in the womb is advocated by the proposed legislation.

Knowledge about severe mental disability is still in its infancy. We are only now learning that it is possible for anencephalic babies (babies born without brains) to grow brains after birth... Or that, like holograms, undamaged parts of a severely damaged brain can take over functions that are normally performed by damaged parts.... Or again, children with cystic fibrosis show remarkable powers of imagination and mathematical ability... Hence humble caution in this area is the mark of the wise. As the historian of medicine Dr. Lewis Thomas has written, albeit in a different context, "The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally competent is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past one hundred years of biology.. . it is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most noteworthy contribution of 20th century science to the human intellect."

Rarely do the handicapped command our respect. Unless of course they happen to be a Beethoven, a Helen Keller or a Stephen Hawking. But here the respect is not for them as humans, but for their almost superhuman abilities at overcoming all odds. Usually the handicapped embarrass us. We want to banish them from sight, either by killing them (if the law permits) or by putting them in remote institutions, just as some societies designate "unclean" things they feel threaten their comfortable social and moral order. Or else we try to make them "fit", by trying to make them conform to our norms of success. Some want to sanitize our language in the name of "political correctness", forbidding us to even use such words as "handicap", thereby at one stroke - robbing the handicapped of their particular and challenging uniqueness.

But what is that challenge? Here we return to the question with which we began. I want to suggest that the handicapped among us present an uncomfortable challenge to our modern illusions of individual self sufficiency and human perfectibility. The handicapped hold up a mirror to our own frailty, vulnerability and inter dependence as a human community. That is the human condition. But in our will to power, we see vulnerability as weakness and inter dependence as constraint. We equate freedom with self gratification, limits with oppression. We see our lives as belonging to ourselves alone. Unfortunately, our mortality makes a mockery of our pretension to be gods. This is probably why so many doctors in our hospitals run away from talking about death with their patients. As long as modern medical practitioners think of themselves as wonder-workers, and of their work as one of human engineering rather than alleviating human suffering wherever possible, they will always think of handicap and death as "failure". But what of their own death? Or even the loss of their skills, say in a serious accident - will they still command respect as humans? The handicapped force us to face such issues that lie at the heart of human existence. How we relate to the most vulnerable and defenseless among us may be a measure of our own humanness, as individuals and as a society.

Let me close with this poem by an English university professor, Frances Young, a committed Christian and herself the mother of a severely handicapped little boy:

"Contemplation gazes in the eyes

of nature's accident, a malformed child.

How can this monstrous sadness still be styled

Human? This surely must epitomize

Those anguished questions that defy the wise.

"Look," some say, by sentiment beguiled,

"The soul peeps out". Absently it smiled,

No eye contact, inert - and vain hope dies.

And yet this passive form cries out in pain,

Hungers for basic needs and pants for breath.

Humanity lies there: we're all the same

Vulnerable and frail, defying death.