Ever since Federico Fellini, Italian film director and scriptwriter coined the term ‘paparazzi’ in his film La Dolce Vita in 1960, the term stuck. The paparazzi are the bounty hunters of the media and some term them as the guerrilla photographers. No wonder the celebrities or whoever was in their viewfinder looked shocked.
The West until today has remained incapable of legally separating freedom of the press and the public icons’ private sanctity which is always subject to monitoring, criticizing, judging and sometimes even mocking. Princess Diana, who was killed in a car accident as result of paparazzi pursuit, is the most famous of victims. In 1997, that seemed horrifically true. Though French courts ruled that the photographers, who chased Princess Diana’s car, were not to blame for her death, the paparazzi’s stunts would rarely seem so light-hearted again.
Certainly we had a pretty good pack of boisterously invasive snappers during our time at the House by the Lake. Some distinguished themselves from the pack with their astonishing instinct for taking the right picture at the right time. But they were babies compared to the paparazzi in Europe particularly because most our national newspapers had a decent outlook and could hardly be called scandal rags.
There were the aces such as the late Hector Sumathipala who was able to photograph people from any angle with great visual effect. He would seem to sneak up on his subjects from behind and capture them vividly with lightning fast snapshots. In those days, style was born of pure necessity. The cameras used were old Rolleiflexes with flashes that took an age to recharge. Photographers knew they would only get one chance, and that they had to be gunslinger fast.
More astonishing was the fact that Hector possessed the ability to focus faster than the eye to capture a split-second slice of real life. He was already a legend by the time I entered the tournament of the press.
Even as primary school students we were entranced by Hector’s classic photograph of Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike gazing at the sea from the old Parliament entrance. Directly in front of him was the statue of the country’s first Prime Minister Don Stephen Senanayake aligned in the same direction. If memory serves me right, the brilliant caption read something like: ‘Two prime ministers with different perspectives gaze at the same horizon.’
I was directly involved in an incident when my colleagues and I were accused of being in the same mould as the paparazzi. It was when the Australia national cricket team toured Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and India in the last three months of 1969. The tour started with a whistle stop in Ceylon, where the Australians played three non-limited-over one-dayers and an unofficial Test.
The ‘Old’ Observer then was conducting its music and singing talent search in collaboration with the country’s leading show-band The Jetliners. The Galle Face Hotel’s Coconut Grove was the weekend venue for the contests which were interspersed with dancing.
Colombo’s jet set frequented the popular shows and ‘The Grove’ was the ‘in’ place to be seen at on a Sunday night. It was certainly Colombo’s ultimate buzzing social scene. Everyone who needed to get into the fashionable swing of things never failed to ‘Groove out at the Grove.’ The ‘Observer’ team conducting the event included staff members Eustace Rulach, yours truly and photographers Rienzie Wijeratne and Chandra Weerawardena.
There was a set of young women who seemed to be camp followers of all visiting cricket squads. They spoke about casual relationships in the same way that the rest of us talked about high calorie counts. They considered themselves to be sexually liberated at a time when conservative Sri Lankan girls were never allowed to attend such functions unless accompanied by trusted chaperones.
These minxes preferred the company of mostly foreign celebrities and appeared to revel in wanton abandon on the dance floor. But strangely they did not seem liberated enough to have their pictures taken while dancing with members of the Aussie cricket squad. Now that was when the trouble began.
The women began bitching to their dancing partners about being snapped by Rienzie.
Our sole intention was to gather sufficient shots for a special photographic feature page of the Aussie squad unwinding. The diminutive Aussie wicket-keeper Brian Taber charged up to Rienzie and pointing to his camera asked him to: “Bury the b.....d.”
I edged between the adversaries and yelled some extremely innovative choice epithets into Taber’s ear. The slanging match continued while we both raised our voices lest they be drowned by the music. Taber said he was going to do something to me too if we didn’t stop taking pictures. I fired back reminding him that he was too short to do anything to anybody.
He then turned around and called on his pace bowling buddy, the towering Graham McKenzie for back up. By then Eustace Rulach who almost matched McKenzie in height waded into the fray. There was a scuffle as we protected the camera and the matter was finally settled without a serious breach of the peace. Besides it could have become a full-blown international incident.
There were more serious incidents such as when Kirthie Abeyesekera and photographer Chandra Weerawardena covered one of the most sensational murder cases at the time. Alfred de Zoysa, a powerful entrepreneur, the chief suspect in the ‘Kalattawa’ murders was being escorted out of the Anuradhapura Magistrate’s court. Chandra kept snapping his picture as he was being frog-marched outside the court. The suspect, dubbed the ‘Terror of Raja Rata’ suddenly elbowed aside his prison warders charged Chandra and kicked his camera smashing it beyond repair.
Alfred de Zoysa was subsequently found guilty of and hanged – not for damaging Chandra’s camera – but for a series of murders in the dark heartland of Anuradhapura. There were other lighter-hearted incidents such as when photographer W. Piyadasa and senior reporter Peter Balasooriya were forced to run for their lives, when chased by a clergyman murder suspect they attempted to snap outside the church rectory. It appeared to be a scene from a circus as the two elderly pressmen scooted down Kynsey Road pursued by the priest with flowing, grizzled beard wielding a murderous pole.
To add colour to the cameo the clergyman was dressed in brief pink shorts and a skinny to match. The scene was further enhanced by the flushed faces of the pursued as the pursuer bellowed threats in the vilest language ever heard from a man of the pulpit.
There were no camerawomen at the time. But I do recall just a single woman photographer we worked with. She was snappy, rebellious, argumentative and un-cooperative. She once insisted that we publish an offensive picture of a male athlete which bordered on the obscene. Her request was turned down by a crusty news editor who fired back at her: “There’s no way we will use this obscenity. You snap-happy Mamarazzi!”
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