Photography is a peculiar, revered course through where art is perceived: a pause in time, a surreal and rather life-like expression of a memory. The gesture performed to trap a precise moment via a camera, a lens or a click of a button may sound like an enigmatic system, but Shiara Gunasekara, photographer extraordinaire, has the whole grasp of it, right in the palm of her hand.

For Shiara Gunasekara, photography first piqued her interest way back when she was a little girl, through the camera that was constantly hanging around her father’s shoulder. She would often wander off on her own to encapsulate her own perspective through a lens; her soul living a world apart, an imagination only she could understand, reflecting onto her pictures. At the age of 13, she practiced portrait photography, a unique form of channelling the distinctive stages of human reaction. At the 16 th milestone of her life, she received her first camera and took up the hobby of relating tales, acted out by her close friends through immobile impressions. Her photographs depict stories through catatonic emotions and well-posed existences, invoking in the onlooker a state of awe and questioning realism within themselves. Shiara’s inimitable pieces of work are spectacles in and of themselves, imploring the observer to inquire its inspiration, for every individual fragment of her collection have history, a novel- worthy incentive and an idiosyncratic purpose.

Light, nature and her surrounding play important roles in her captures as authentic instruments, bringing her subject of focus alive and paying meticulous attention to every molecule and detail. Her portraits have varying degrees of colour and lack of colour, an assortment of monochrome and vibrant images, revealing illusions of a fairy-tale like world, reverence relentless in its course, complimenting angles and edges precisely and scrupulously.

Two years later, Shiara finds herself at the realization that photography was her calling; a medium where she could express her creativity and skill, and a platform to bring her thoughts alive. Photography is her passion. She is currently exploring and learning about the field of photography but believes that it is who she is, who she wants to be and where she wants to go.