Tag: children

Family Time at the Bay

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Evening at Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka. May 2022.

• 18mm • f/3.5 • 1/250 • ISO400 • 600D & EF-S18-200/3.5-5.6 •

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Where were You, Dad, When We Sent the Tyrants Home?

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Protestors atop the barricades at the Sri Lankan Presidential Secretariat, at Galle face, Colombo, call for President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government to resign; accused of corruption and ineptitude that has created the worst economic crisis in the country’s modern history. The Galle Face demonstration, which began on 9th April 2022, is now in its fourth week, dubbed ‘Gotagogama’, after the protestors’ primary demand — “Gota, Go Home!” The protests have seen Sri Lankans turn out in hundreds of thousands, mostly middle and working classes, of all ages and ethnicities, united in suffering, and a hope of turning things around before it’s too late. An acute shortage of foreign exchange reserves has seen Sri Lanka unable to import essential fuel, causing widespread electricity cuts, some as long as thirteen hours a day, and forcing millions to stand in interminably long queues for petrol, diesel, and cooking gas. President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his Prime Minister, and older brother, Mahinda Rajapakse, have refused to resign in spite of the protests, prolonging the crisis. Vital medicines and essential supplies are running out, and the government has already indicated that it will default on its $51 billion foreign debt repayments due in June. With the country on the verge of bankruptcy, any recovery depends on a prompt replacement of the current administration, as the protestors are demanding.

• 170mm • f/5.6 • 1/250 • ISO100 •

Twilight on the Wall #2

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The southwestern ramparts of the Galle Fort, from the Flagrock Bastion. The unsightly block on the horizon, beyond the Triton Bastion, is the new Oceanfront Condominiums building at Dadalla which, along with the Araliya Resort on Rumassala, blights the view both up and down the coast. Sri Lanka, January 2022.*

*Shot on a Canon EOS 5DMkIV & EF 24-105/f4L, courtesy Canon/Metropolitan.

Mutual Curiosity

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Stewart Road, Slave Island. January 2022.*

*Shot on a Canon EOS 5DMkIV & EF 24-105/f4L, courtesy Canon/Metropolitan.

Shall I Play for You

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Children’s Choir, Cathedral of Christ the Living Saviour, Colombo. Christmas, 2018. Shot on assignment for Smart Media and Gateway College.

The Road to Freedom

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Children from a plantation workers’ community walk to school in Bagawantalawa, in the Sri Lankan Central Highlands, in February 2014. Education is key if these children (particularly the girls) are to break free of the cycle of hard labour and poverty that they have endured for over a century. Of South Indian origin, these workers were imported by the British Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to pick, for a pittance, the famous Ceylon Tea that is produced by some of the world’s most famous brands. In the Central Highlands, and other rural areas of Sri Lanka, children often walk long distances and endure bad weather and the threat of wild animals to obtain the education the state doles out in varying degrees of quality. None of these hardships have, however, crippled education for Sri Lankan children the way the Corona Pandemic has. Across the island, schools have been shut for over a year and a half, substituted with online classrooms to which children in remote communities, with no smart phones, computers, or the internet, have little access. With no date set by the government for the reopening of schools, the longterm effects on this generation of rural children seems of little concern in the halls of power.

Their Future, for Our Today

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Schoolgirls at computer class in an international school on the outskirts of Colombo, in November 2018.
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Morning Hoop Time

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The 1st Hour Project #40 -- little girl playing with hoops.
While most of her family still sleeps, a little girl gets in some playtime in her half-finished home in Gampaha, Sri Lanka. Shot in September 2016, for J Walter Thompson’s ‘The 1st Hour Project’, a study on how urban families spend the first hour of their day.