• Unpublished photographs were exhibited at Alliance Française de Colombo

Photography, especially travel photography, has always been about discovering new facets of life and learning about locations and locals. This was what Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss travel writer and photographer, discovered when he spent some time tucked away in the idyllic 1950s Galle, recounting his experiences and writing his autobiographical novel, ‘The Scorpion Fish’.

The Daily Morning Brunch recently had the opportunity to experience ‘Nicolas Bouvier à Galle, 70 Years Later’; an exhibition of previously unpublished photographs that gave us a first-hand glimpse into Bouvier’s artistic lens. The exhibition was held on 6 March at the Alliance Française de Colombo and was filled with discussions on Bouvier and his take on Sri Lankan society.

“When Nicolas Bouvier came to Galle, he had a complicated relationship with the town and with the local population,” Radio Télévision Suisse journalist Adrien Krause said. “However, despite his reservations, he ended up capturing the good, the bad, and the ugly of Galle through his lens, highlighting the complexity of post-Independence Sri Lankan society.”

A complex, but complete society

Krause emphasised that through his book, ‘The Scorpion Fish’, Bouvier tried to paint Galle and as a result Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, as a place where the quaint and the supposedly questionable intermingled to form a complex yet complete society.

The book follows a narrator arriving at his rented room on an unnamed island which was based on Sri Lanka. As the narrator experiences both physical and mental collapse, his obsessions with the insects that share his space as well as his observations of himself and the island’s inhabitants grow.

“Bouvier’s view of Sri Lanka was coloured by the Anglo-Christian view he was exposed to for all of his life,” Krause said. “He often did not understand the islanders’ relaxed attitude to everyday life and therefore was quite critical of it. He also did not understand various aspects of the Sri Lankan climate and why so many insects like mosquitoes gathered around him.”

When one looks at Bouvier’s photography of 1950s Galle, one does not see the boutique hotels and the coffee shops that have become popular among locals and tourists alike but the quiet life of its inhabitants who were trying to get through another day.

The black and white images showcase the city of Galle in its various stages of life; a woman fetching water from a pump, a lonely shop with a bunch of bananas ready to be sold and eaten, and a man standing in front of his collection of clay pots staring straight into the lens. Galle was quaint and yet to the people of that time, it was home.

The local landscape

Bouvier came to Sri Lanka less than a decade after the country had gained its independence, where the country was in a cocoon of transformation from colony to fully-fledged nation. Development was still in its early stages and the island was far from the nation that Bouvier had grown up in.

The photographer had been born and raised in the famously neutral Switzerland and the global effects of decolonisation and economic and cultural restructuring had little to no effect on him. Bouvier was also educated in a society that was predominantly Christian which contributed to an often-misunderstood view of Sri Lanka religion and spirituality.

The 1950s were a time where desegregation in most countries was still a topic of contention and the world had not yet opened up to more inclusive thinking. Nicholas Bouvier was a man affected by those values, thus contributing to his somewhat negative view of his stay in Galle and Sri Lanka.

Yet, despite his mixed feelings, the photographs display the island and its people at its finest: Honest, humble, and hard-working.