Kaitlin Emmanuel, PhD Candidate in History of Art, has published a peer-reviewed essay titled “Visionary or Voyeur: Lionel Wendt and the Contradictions of Late Colonial Modernity in Ceylon” in the leading scholarly Art Journal, a flagship journal published by the College Art Association. Her essay is included in the Summer 2024 issue.
Emmanuel analyses the work of the Ceylonese avant-garde photographer Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). She concludes by observing, “I read his work as emerging in the crucible of a weakening colonialism, competing nationalisms, and a deepening capitalism in which the question of labor had become central. The internal tension between expressions of modernism, voyeurism, elitism, and anticolonial sentiment in Wendt’s photographs is itself a manifestation of the political divisions that characterized late-colonial modernity in Ceylon.”
