Fading Cranes

Denzil documents the structures and surroundings as a tribute to his memories of the church in his ancestral village in Sri Lanka.

5 min readMar 15, 2022

Tell us a bit about yourself:

I’m a nomad who left Sri Lanka as a young lad. I am a tech enthusiast, photographer and, more recently, a budding storyteller. I am a global citizen.

What drew you to photographing the Dalugama church?:

I was born and raised in Dalugama. Dalugama was a sleepy village back then despite being just ten kilometres from the capital, Colombo. I was baptised in the Dalugama church when Sri Lanka was Ceylon and emerging as an independent country. As a schoolboy, my memories of the church and its surroundings are edged in my brain. It is a fairy tale from a bygone era.

The church was part of the local landscape. Young boys played on the church ground. Most of the local youth attended the adjoining school. The centrepiece was the church, the melting pot for them.

What is the part of the church I like?:

I liked the old church’s frontage. Its design was ahead of its time. It was a new modern concept that broke free from the old paradigm.

Why did you like the front facade?

The Catholic church went on a massive reform program in the sixties. Until then, services were held in Latin, a dead language nobody understood, least of all the locals. The church tried to modernise the Catholic institution to make it more relevant to the local populace.

In 1965, the Dalugama church celebrated its centenary. The villagers collected money to modernise the church building. They built a wing and a new balcony for the choir and reoriented the altar to face the crowd. The frontage was rebuilt in a simple design, discarding a traditional century-old Italian-style facade.

The renovated Dalugama church was one of the ultra-modern-looking churches in Sri Lanka. The design was state-of-the-art and leading edge to the point of being revolutionary.

What was involved in creating these photos?

About fifteen years ago, thirty years after I left Sri Lanka, it dawned on me that those memories of my youth would be lost forever.

I was surprised at how fast the church and its surrounding village had changed and was changing. From sleepy rural settings, it was becoming a semi-rural town.

Having lived my adult life outside Sri Lanka, I saw my old church as an outlander many decades after my initial experiences. I was not there to see the change and transition of buildings, environment, people, and culture.

So, I captured the church and its surroundings on my camera as a token of my flashback. Better be late than never. It was already thirty years too late.

It was my effort to freeze my memories on record.

Why did you call the project fading cranes?

Back in the day, during the monsoon rains, the ground in front of the church flooded. The white cranes (සුදු කොකා) came there in hundreds in search of food when the whole front yard of the church was immersed in water. It was their feeding ground until the water subsided.

The disappearance of cranes has something to do with changing the settings.

What do you hope people take away from viewing your work?

I don’t want to sound too naïve and nostalgic. Change is a fact. Because I was not there to witness the gradual change, I have not been part of it. People are visual beings, and images have an emotional touching effect. That is why I wanted to record the vivid images of the church and its surroundings as a tribute to the times gone by and to those beautiful memories.