Untitled (A Nude Male Portrait)

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 (A nude Male Portrait) comes from a group of formal portraits that Wendt took in which he experimented with the technique of solarization. The male model is seen in profile, his bare back and buttocks on view, sitting on a traditional textile. This composition is then treated with a modern photographic technique which overexposure (partially) inverts dark and light sections. By employing solarization Wendt casts his model as a modern subject, and not an allusion to any ethnographic or classical mode of representation. The formal and aesthetic achievements of Untitled (A nude Male Portrait) confirm Wendt’s place as a pioneer of modern photography in South Asia, but also as an artist interested in and committed to exploring sexuality.