Vinukh Kalansuriya

Intercru’s latest article dives into the college lifestyle with photographer Vinukh Kalansuriya. Enjoy the party and don’t forget to turn on the flash!

Intercru: Where are you from?

Vinukh: I was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Growing up essentially a few feet away from the beach whilst simultaneously being amidst a civil war gave me a unique perspective to life. This juxtaposition also gave me an urge to capture singular moments in chaos.

Where do you live and work now?

Around three or so years ago I moved to California to pursue an undergraduate education. Currently I reside in Westwood, California and am a pre-law student at the University of California– Los Angeles.

As of right now I live in one of the fraternities on campus and as a result am able to capture a college lifestyle very unique to the United States. At the moment I work as a wedding videographer in Southern California.

How did you get started as a photographer?

As a child my father used to let me use his DSLR when we went camping in the jungles of Sri Lanka to take a few photos of animals. This piqued my interest in photography and when I first purchased a camera of my own for wedding videography, I also used it for wildlife photography whenever I went back home.

As I grew my photography skills and myself as a person I was able to figure out what kind of niches I actually liked to capture.

What do you like about using film instead of digital?

The look and emotion film photos gave me made me want to utilize it as a way of capturing my life in static motion. I first started off with disposable cameras and then grew my collection as I figured out what I wanted to capture and how I wanted to go about doing so.

The slowed down process of taking a photo on film using old cameras also made me fall in love with the process of using a camera. Through wedding videography my connection to cameras and the results it produced was numbed. The fact that it was so different to what my work was made me love everything to do with film.

What’s your favorite part about photography?

Definitely the ability to capture moments in chaos and the thought of knowing that sometime down the line my friends and I would still have a way of reliving our memories through the photos.

We live in an age right now where everything moves so quickly and it is easy to forget important times in our lives and that is why I think photography acts as a great medium of documenting life to make it timeless.