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Lionel George Henricus Wendt (1900-1944) was a pianist, critic, filmmaker and photographer. His father came from a Burgher community of mixed European ancestry, and his mother was Sinhalese. Upon his death a fellow photographer destroyed his cache of negatives.
4 comments:
Wow... brutal. The destroying of someone's life work. What in the world?
Lovely stuff. Visiting your blog is like seeing a new museum exhibit. I learn so much... I see so much new to me. Thank you, hon.
Hello Upton! Great to hear from you. Whether an instruction in a will or the handy work of an intimate, it is truly a pity. I also sense that in the past it was done to 'protect' the person from being maligned after death. Willa Cather's and Mazo de la Roche's personal correspondence were both, by their own hand or with the help of close companions, consigned to the flames. I could find no evidence of a 'Mrs. Wendt' on the internet, so this leads me to believe he may have been one of us - but to be honest, I've only researched him as far as Wikipedia took me.
Hello! Glad to see your latest retrospective on Lionel Wendt. I've been searching for a copy of his book "Ceylon" forever, and given the models, settings and overall tone, I'm guessing many of these works originate from there. Agreed with your previous commenter that privacy measures taken at the time by surviving colleagues may have been the cause of such an extreme step of destroying his legacy, although I would argue that the "implied" nature of some of these works should have been a point of reconsider a secret storage option. Still, what is left is a great example of seeing through Mr. Wendt's artistic eye and glad we have what do, particularly since we don't have a lot of current artists applying such nuance/use of digital photo tech "flattening" images to stark reality. Thanks for posting, and hope to see more explorations of this kind (health and time permitting of course). Regards, Dan
Dan, he (more than) dabbled in many fields and seems quite a prolific fellow indeed! Best of luck on the search. Have you tried ABE books? They have literally anything and everything, current and long out of print, rare and hard-to-find. Give it a try, and thanks for commenting!
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