Untitled (Torso of a Young Man)

Born in 1900 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Lionel Wendt hailed from the Burgher community, a mixed race, prominent elite minority. Trained as a lawyer and concert pianist in England, Wendt only took up the medium of photography formally in the 1930s. A considered and well-researched photographer, Wendt eagerly kept abreast of technical developments in the field, and would gradually apply them to his work, at times combining a number of different techniques in a single photograph. Most popular amongst the techniques he experimented with are photograms, photomontage, double printing and solarization, the latter of which he encountered in reproductions of photographs by the American surrealist Man Ray. The subject of Wendt’s photographic output runs the gamut from a range of documentary images, to studio portraits, to more experimental photos.

A dominant strand in Wendt’s oeuvre is carefully composed studio portraits, with an explicit focus on the body, mostly the nude or half clothed male body. Untitled (Torso of a Young Man) is not a portrait image of a male sitter, but instead more of a formal study of the figure. Aware of how the idealized male form is consistently represented in classical Greco-Roman sculpture, Wendt brings some of those references in how he photographs Ceylonese men. This is emphasized in this study by the choice of crops made mid-thigh and mid-head to draw attention to the muscled torso of the model.