Open Door Gallery

Liz Doles - Sri Lanka Pinhole Photography and Portraits

April 22 - July 19, 2013

Opening Reception:
April 25 2013, 4pm to 7pm. Artist talk at 6pm.

The Open Door Gallery presents an intimate view of contemporary Sri Lanka photography by Fulbright Artist and Teacher Liz Doles.

Artist's Statement:

I traveled to Sri Lanka in 2011 on a Fulbright grant to capture the long lived and often overlooked architectural heritage of this corner of South Asia. While traversing the country in buses, trains and trishaws, I was beguiled not only with the monuments and the myths of the powerful, but with more humble dwellings, shacks, shops and above all, with the countenance of the ordinary and the unsung.

Sri Lanka is a tiny country that looms large on the international scene. For the past eighteen months, I have been living and photographing in the country formerly called Ceylon. This exhibit embodies my vision of a nation poised at the edge of transformation from a land torn by horrific internecine strife into South Asia’s next miracle.

The rich architectural heritage bequeathed by religion and royalty in Sri Lanka is the focus of my pinhole photography. Lush vegetation conspired with political and natural circumstances to shield these structures from ravages of time, ruins that sit beyond time and testimony.

Of no less aesthetic value are the quieter vernacular buildings that create the charm of Ceylon. Cadjun huts, British bungalows, and ramshackle apartments speak of the diversity and richness of both the contemporary urban environment as well as the character of village life.

I spent time photographing the faces of the post war Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians who quite literally rub shoulders as they strive to form a cohesive national identity in this densely populated land.

"Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everyone there looks an original . . ." - George Bernard Shaw.

Reprinted from Sri Lanka Sunday Times by Smriti Daniel:

Even before you hear her story, you know there’s something unusual about Liz Doles’ photographs of Sri Lankan buildings and monuments. Her beautiful images are unabashedly evocative and romantic, seeming to belong to an older, far simpler time. They have a fuzzy quality, for the lack of a better description, even though a closer inspection will reveal that every element is equally in focus. The streets are bereft of people but the light seems to endow structures like the Jami-Ul-Alfar mosque in Pettah with their own internal glow. The clues all point in one direction – a pinhole camera.

The story of how she found herself in Sri Lanka, taking pictures with a spray painted laundry box isn't a long one as Liz tells it. As a younger woman, she contracted acute ophthalmic thyroid disease or Graves’ Disease – it left her with severe double vision and a reduced perception of colour.

Her doctors had warned this single mother that she might lose her sight altogether so she was forced to undergo several difficult corrective surgeries over a number of years. In the end, her sight did finally stabilise. (Today, the only indications of anything amiss are the outsize red frames of her spectacles.) Unfortunately by the time Liz had recovered, she had irreversibly lost her momentum on her graphic design business – “I was no longer in the loop,” she says, confessing that she felt herself floundering in a field dominated by much younger people. Facing this amalgamation of artistic, physical, financial and professional crises head on, she chose to reinvent herself.

Though she enjoys painting and sketching, her photography is where her personal revolution really unfolded She put together her own inexpensive equipment: a box which had an aperture made out of a tin can smoothed down with sand paper and curtained by a slice of tape acting as a lens cap. For Liz, her new pinhole camera was a delight and the pictures it produced were evenly bathed in a light that was neither day nor night. The entire image remained in focus across the picture plane. She explains how she loves the adventure of working without a viewfinder or LCD panel. Her composition instead is based on instinct, intuition and experience and is influenced by time of day, longitude and season and even then she never knows what she’s going to get. “The way I take pictures relies so much on serendipity,” says Liz.

Her unusual approach won her a Fulbright scholarship to live and work in Sri Lanka and she spent several months here taking photographs before heading back to the States, where she exhibited some of her work. The decision to return to the island was an easy one – she missed the warmth and the food, but most importantly she wanted more pictures. Liz was gunning for 1000 and she had only taken half that number.

“There’s a certain quality to life in Sri Lanka. I love the quality of the air, the colour of the light, it’s beautiful for photography,” she says. She was also interested in adding many more images to her series of portraits of Sri Lankans, collected under the category Lankavaa Lassanai. On the lookout for sponsors, she says she wants to stage a full scale exhibition, one where she can hang her prints at mural size and perhaps even produce a coffee table book.

We meet just after Liz has signed a contract that will keep her in Sri Lanka for the foreseeable future– quietly excited, she is still reverberating from the implications of her decision. Working at the Academy of Design, she intends to teach as well as assist in the administration of the institution. It is a great leap of faith, but one that Liz describes as incredibly liberating. “I packed up everything. I let go of my apartment. I don’t own any winter clothes now.” Everything she brought with her fit into two suitcases – “that was my whole life there,” she says.

Now in Sri Lanka, she can savour the luxury of time. She has already travelled a bit with her dear friend Noeline Fernando but is planning more adventures in the coming months. On her day-long jaunts, she sometimes keeps to an itinerary, but more often than not, she just picks a bus and rides it to its last stop.

She’s confident she can always find her way back to Colombo. The months she’s spent here have seen her grow accustomed to life on the island and she knows the way the light works here. 45 seconds to a minute of exposure will get her the image she wants, but she chooses also to work within other self-imposed parameters. “I don’t bring along tripods and better lighting,” she says, explaining that “these constraints make for a stronger image. It’s got to be what it is, in that moment and that’s part of what it means.”

Of course, these rules don’t always make for personal comfort. While conducting the delicate operation of transferring her light sensitive film from the camera to its bag on a street in Pettah, she found herself thoroughly unnerved to be looking into the eyes of a feral rat. She shudders theatrically while recounting the story, but we both know that it will take much more to drag Liz away from the beautiful heart of the old city.

“When I first came here, I thought that it was going to be about the architecture of religion and power and then I became interested in street corners and vernacular architecture just as much,” she says, examining her fascination with the seemingly mundane. “Where I sense a spiritual presence is where I put my camera. ” The people too are a big draw. In the U.S.A attempting to take a photograph of a complete stranger is a process fraught with complications: “They ask me, ‘Are you with the government?’ In Sri Lanka, people just jump in front of the camera, literally. They’re happy to have their photograph taken,” says Liz.

For Liz, having embraced life in a new country, these are halcyon days, rich with promise. “I know I’m not done,” she says, “There’s so much more to come.”

Additional information about Liz Doles:

www.lizdoles.com

A Journal of my Sri Lanka Year

Huffington Post

University of Massachusetts

All photographs are available for sale:
Pinhole 16x20 $275, Portrait 11x14 $125.

The Open Door Gallery promotes the work of artists with disabilities and shifts our community's perceptions of ability while enjoying quality art.