Man with Printed Sarong, c. 1933-44, by Lionel Wendt

A lawyer, pianist, critic, and mentor to artists, Lionel Wendt is best known for his photographs of Sri Lanka, especially those of people indigenous to the island, captured amidst the lush landscape or posing in his studio. All of Wendt’s photographs were made during a period of great experimentation that began in 1932 and ended with his premature death in 1944. These photos started gaining renewed attention within Sri Lanka with publication and exhibition in the 1990s, and further after a trove of prints accidentally found in storage began making its way to dealers and institutions across the world. The recognition of Wendt’s pioneering work is not surprising given that his images challenge the colonial documentation of ethnographic types and emphasize form and sensuality, particularly in his portraits of working-class men and folk artists. Man with Printed Sarong is one such example, but like other similar images it reveals little about the subject and instead points to the photographer’s intent of evoking a mood of eroticism. While Wendt’s work captures people and places of Sri Lanka in the years before it gained independence, it also opens itself to the present in scholarly reconsiderations of modernism and queerness in art practices outside the West.