{"id":26893,"date":"2013-12-07T13:03:35","date_gmt":"2013-12-07T18:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=26893"},"modified":"2013-12-07T17:06:22","modified_gmt":"2013-12-07T22:06:22","slug":"tenth-death-anniversary-of-rienzie-wijeratne-press-photographer-par-excellence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=26893","title":{"rendered":"Tenth death anniversary of Rienzie Wijeratne, Press Photographer Par Excellence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rienzie

Rienzie Wijeratne<\/p><\/div>\n

by Manik de Silva<\/strong><\/p>\n

December 5 marked the tenth death anniversary of Rienzie Wijeratne, unarguably the best known press photographer of his day who had a long and distinguished career at Lake House and thereafter worked for a few years for some other newspapers before he immigrated to Canada with his wife, Sheila.
\n
\nRienzie was an extremely skilled photographer with a nose for news pictures although he was perhaps best known during the height of his career as a fashion photographer. Always well dressed and never flustered, many people did not know that his professional skills played a major part in Sri Lanka\u2019s early thrust into the tourism industry with resort developers turning to him to shoot the pictures they used to promote their properties.<\/p>\n

I knew Rienzie for many years in the old Ceylon Observer during its heyday under the legendary Denzil Pieris. A highly organized man, Rienzie had a small cupboard tucked away in a corner of the newsroom where he had all the wherewithal not only for his photography but also for his record keeping.<\/p>\n

The first thing he did after Sheila, on her way to Mackinon\u2019s where she long worked dropped him off at Lake House (he was always chauffeured by his wife) , was to open this cupboard, take out scissors and paste and clip the various photographs he had shot that had appeared in that day\u2019s newspaper for his scrapbook. This was a ritual and his scrapbooks, which I\u2019m sure Sheila would have preserved, would be a fine pictorial history of the time.<\/p>\n

He was equally meticulous about filing his negatives too. In a time when archiving had not reached the current levels of sophistication with computers doing the work that had to be manually done some decades previously, there wasn\u2019t a picture that Rienzie had shot that he could not retrieve.<\/p>\n

His life as a photojournalist brought him in touch with the big and small. I particularly remember one of his anecdote about our colleague, photographer Neil Moses who died in Australia some years ago, and then Governor-General Sir Oliver Goonatillake. Neil was a very dark small made sprat of a man who was so strong that he could crush an aerated water stopper between his thumb and index finger.<\/p>\n

Assigned to cover a Queen\u2019s House event shortly after he joined Lake House, he was pleasantly surprised when Sir. Oliver sought him out for a very cordial conversation addressing him by his first name. He came back to the office and full of the Governor-General even knowing his name.<\/p>\n

Rienzie let us into the secret. Sir. Oliver seeing a new face among the press photographers walked up to Rienzie and stammered the question, “Rienzie, kkkkalu ekage nama mokadda?”<\/p>\n

“Neil Moses,” replied Rienzie and that was how Sir Oliver, with the greatest familiarity addressed the kalu eka as “Neil” as though he had known him well!<\/p>\n

A troublesome knee which required replacement surgery took Rienzie to Canada where the surgery was successfully done easing the last lap of his life. There were a few former Lake House journalists, also immigrants to Canada, living around the area where Rienzie and Sheila made their new home. He used to meet them occasionally and talk often to them on the phone reminiscing about old times.<\/p>\n

There are many, and not only journalists, who have fond memories of this man. Rienzie Wijeratne was a famous name that is remembered although his heyday is long gone.<\/p>\n

(This Article appears in “Sunday Island” of which Manik de Silva is the Editor)<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Manik de Silva December 5 marked the tenth death anniversary of Rienzie Wijeratne, unarguably the best known press photographer of his day who had a long and distinguished career at Lake House and thereafter worked for a few years for some other newspapers before he immigrated to Canada with his wife, Sheila.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26893"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26897,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893\/revisions\/26897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}