Master photographer Eric Peris has done much to make black-and-white photography a credible and legitimate form of expression in Malaysia.
Well known for keeping a low profile, he opens up to Anandhi Gopinath in a rare interview and shares the secret to his genius.

A photographer’s form of expression is not verbal; it is pictorial. The written word is not for him; he paints vivid pictures in his mind and with his camera, and tells the world his stories silently. We sometimes do not give photographers enough credit, taking for granted the work they do and the world they bring to life. Going to places we have never been, seeing sights we often miss and capturing life that tends to pass us by — photographers see the world for us, giving us a window that looks outside of our own little universe. In essence, they are storytellers of a tale we sometimes do not even know exists.

Legendary Malaysian photographer Eric Peris is one such storyteller. His quiet voice and gentle features speak of a man who has seen much of the world; they also reveal a desire to see even more. The distant expression in Eric’s brown eyes is not to be confused with being distracted, it only means a new idea is germinating in his mind.

Many people know Eric as one of the leading photographers in the country, and at 70 years old, he is one of the oldest. He is especially famous for the startling beauty of his photography and the almost effortless manner in which his pictures make the simplest of ideas come so magically to life. Eric’s career emerged while he was serving as a photojournalist and then photo editor of the New Straits Times (NST), where he trained many press photographers and inspired an entire generation.

Now that he’s retired, Eric spends time taking pictures, organising exhibitions and caring for his 90-something-year-old mum. He is on the regional selection panel of the annual Young Press Photographers programme for the Joop Swart Master Class World Press Photo Foundation, one of the most prestigious events in the global photography industry.

Famously low profile, Eric rarely does press interviews. His recent presence in the media was necessitated by his latest exhibition at the Sutra Gallery entitled The Way I See. Since it’s the year he celebrates turning 70, Eric decided the exhibition — the 40th of his career and the 20th at Sutra — would be retrospective in nature, featuring pieces from the start of his career right up to his more recent works. He has promised that the exhibition will also debut never-before-seen images taken over the years.

“Ramli says it’s a good year, a good number. It’s a good number for me also,” Eric says in his soft drawl, referring to Sutra founder Ramli Ibrahim. “And I always have my exhibitions here.” The two are old friends as Eric used to take pictures of Ramli dancing when he first started out. It was the start of many other dance-related pictures that Eric would take as the years progressed.

The rest of his extensive body of work covers any and all aspects of life and its environment — indeed, Eric’s stock-in-trade is his uncanny ability to capture everyday images and miraculously translate them into stunning pieces of art. Another differentiating factor is his use of black-and-white photography.

From a purely visual standpoint, Eric’s body of work is outstanding for its ability to appeal with equal emotion to the most discerning of photography connoisseurs as well as the common man. Black-and-white pictures are powerful enough in their own right, but Eric’s seem to be able to say more.

Also noteworthy are the subjects of his photographs and what inspires him. Eric’s works are random, adding to the sense of mystery that surrounds his exhibitions — you never really know what to expect. Upon meeting him, one cannot help but wonder how he sees what he sees.

As we settle down for a chat at Sutra, Eric’s eyes rove around the cluttered room carefully, resting on nothing. My twirling pen catches his eye briefly, and then he stops to glance at the jangling bells hanging on Gundu, one of the dogs that live at the gallery. His cup of tea, the milk in which swirls like the skirt of a flamenco dancer, then comes into his view. Has inspiration struck him, perhaps?

“People always ask me how I get my inspiration, how I get my images,” Eric says, pre-empting my first question. “How do you create these pictures? I always tell people I didn’t create these pictures. None of any of my pictures are anything I made, because it has always been there. Whether it’s a plant or a flower or a situation… it’s always been there. What I have done over the years is to develop my eye to see. That is the important part of it; the art of seeing is what makes the difference. When you develop the art of seeing, you can suddenly see much more.”

A staunch Buddhist, Eric’s spiritual inclinations have shaped much of his approach to photography and influenced his style — not just the Zen-like quality of many of his images, but from a technical standpoint as well. “I practise the art of detachment. People are puzzled about what detachment is. You may look at a tulip or a rose and you are enchanted by it… so you are attached to its beauty. But if you are detached from that, you see it for what it is. Then you see much more of what is really in front you. This concept of detachment has always been a guiding force for me. And once you master this art of seeing, then you can really start taking the kind of pictures you want,” he explains.

My crash course in photography continues as Eric goes on to describe other things that make the perfect picture. I listen intently, observing how speaking about photography brings out Eric’s personality in such a lovely way. While his voice remains soft, his hands are now gesturing more animatedly, his brown eyes sparkling behind his wire-rimmed spectacles.

“To get a picture that is of some interest, you need to understand what you are looking at. If I don’t understand the elements in front of me, I won’t take the picture. If I can’t fathom the elements, I can’t picture it. It won’t be a bad picture, it just won’t be what I want. What I usually do when this happens is leave the picture alone and go have some teh tarik. Then I return to it and see what happens. Sometimes the light has changed so the picture then makes sense. It’s about patience — photography needs patience,” he finishes off with a grin.

What about the right equipment? Doesn’t good photography need a nice camera, a flash, or a tripod? “I don’t even know how to use a flash,” he says simply. “A flash is an added piece of equipment which I’m not too keen to carry around. I don’t carry tripods either; I just use a wall or whatever for support. You see, the camera is a dodo. It can’t do anything by itself! Pictures look nice because of what you see through the lens.”

Good point. I bring him back to the topic of The Way I See by asking him about the kinds of works that he has chosen to be exhibited.

“When I thought of doing this exhibition, I decided I would include pieces from Through Thai Windows and Doorways, my first exhibition in 1982. I remember when I first staged it — it was at Victor Chin’s gallery. He came to my house, saw the pictures and said ‘This is great, you should definitely show all these pictures.’ It was revolutionary at that time because it gave a different perspective to what photography is. No flowers or rivers or sunsets, nothing like that. It was all scenes of life. It went quite well,” he shares.

He leans back and thinks for a second. “Okay, maybe this new exhibition isn’t really a retrospective. I am trying to show pictures that question… that will make people say, how did you go about doing this? And then I will try to answer if they do ask me,” he says.

Apart from Through Thai Windows and Doorways, other pieces that Eric is exhibiting includes landscapes, city life, pieces produced during his years as a photojournalist as well a selection of pictures based on Gitanjali, a poem by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Eric will also be showing a lot of hand-coloured works, a technique that was created early this century to bring life to basic black-and-white images. Hand-colouring pictures requires some level of artistic skill as it’s far more than simply painting within the lines — it’s also about choosing what sections of the pictures to paint and what colours would work.

“It’s not about colouring in the whole picture, then you may as well take a colour picture. Hand-colouring pictures lets you breathe your own life into the picture that you see,” he explains. He remembers watching Tibetan monks some years ago fill in the coloured sand of a mandala and the deep impact it had on him.

“The mandala is entirely made of sand,” he says, amazement filling his voice. “It’s such fine work. My god, the patience these guys had to rub the sand into the mandala... I also found out that there were certain colours that they used in the mandala. The word sarkara means sand, so I did a series called Sarkara. They were all pictures of the sand, and I coloured them in with colours that are used in the mandala. It was an experiment; it went quite well,” he says again.

With this it was easy to cull from Eric what his technique and inspiration are, a question he generally evades by giving the subject all the credit. But even as he talks, there is a sense of humility about the man that’s hard to miss. For him, the world is a big, beautiful place and all he’s done is arrive with a camera at the right place, at the right time.

There is also an innocent quality to the way he speaks that has very easily translated into his work. When he artfully describes his most recent exhibition, a hand-coloured series of images that capture fungus growing on trees, his explanation sounds almost child-like in its unaffected, simple manner.

“My sister passed away in February 2006,” he says, almost apropos of nothing. “And she taught me a lot about light and shadows… There was a little garden in the house. She would ring me every day and tell me how the light changed. Once she passed away, I wanted to do something for her, and so I did a series of pictures of that garden,” he relates. I remain silent, overcome by the stillness of the moment his comment inspired.

“My ideas come from everywhere,” he adds. “I read a lot, especially Asian literature. I also like music — I am a great lover of Beethoven’s music, especially his pastorals. So I thought, our pastorals are our rice fields. So I did a series called Pastoral featuring the rice fields in Kedah. Ideas are everywhere, really. You want ideas? Just look around and be patient and it will come.”

• • •

As far as artistic inheritances go, Eric’s pedigree is hard to beat. His father O Don Peris and mother were both artists, and left Sri Lanka for Malaysia in the early part of the century. Don eventually went on to be the Royal Artist for the Johor Sultanate in the 1920s. “My father was a painter, he produced stage plays, he even baked. He was a ghazal musician and a weightlifter. He was really a multi-talented man. After we arrived in Johor Baru from Sri Lanka, he opened up the Ceylon Bakery. Gradually, he came to know some members of the royal family like Tengku Temenggong Ahmad, and that’s how he was commissioned by the Johor court to paint,” Eric relates.

A bigger fan of theatre than art, Don later moved the family to Muar where he lived his dream of producing operas. The arrival of WWII later made staging operas impossible.

Don, a strict father, had never wanted his children to become artists. “No way was I allowed to be an artist. My father knew that it would be hard to survive. He wanted us to learn about art just to do things,” Eric explains. However, Don — who started his art career at the age of 10 — made sure that his knowledge as an artist was something he gave his children. Not just a keen sense of innovation and creativity, but also technical skills like colour, light and even a knowledge of art history. Young Eric grew up surrounded by great European masters like Rembrandt, whose etching work later inspired his foray into black-and-white photography.

Eric later left Johor for the shores of Singapore to study physics, but it didn’t result in a professional qualification. “I didn’t finish the exams, in fact I really hated them. I just wanted to learn and have knowledge,” he qualifies. “Over the years, I have noticed that my physics training has really helped my photography.”

He then joined a pop magazine called Fanfare as a journalist in 1969, and this was when photography very fortuitously fell into his lap. “My editor Mr Sabaratnam one day gave me a camera and told me ‘just go and take some pictures’. So I did, and then he told me to do both writing and photography… and that’s how I started my career in photojournalism.”
He then joined the NST as a photojournalist, and when the company split its Malaysian and Singaporean operations, Eric opted to return to Malaysia. Covering the pop and live music circuit, Eric later moved to KL and remembers writing about and taking pictures of bands like The Strollers. At that time, he also met a young, up-and-coming dancer named Ramli and a lifelong friendship was formed.

Eric’s tenure at NST as photojournalist and subsequently photo editor lasted many years, during which he met and trained several young photographers. Freelance photographer S C Shekar trained under Eric as a rookie press photographer in the 1980s and remains inspired today by the simple lessons he learnt. “It’s not just me, though. So many senior press photographers today trained under him, and I’d like to think that we all bear in some small part a mark of his genius. He introduced black-and-white photography in Malaysia as a credible, legitimate form of expression. Its popularity now is all from him and his work,” Shekar says.

Eric speaks little about his time in the press. For some reason, he is in the mood to talk about his parents and what they taught him. He leans back and smiles as he recalls, “My father and mother had put this rule to me. Whenever you bring out a piece of work for people to see, it means you are ready to show it. I asked my father ‘What if people don’t like it?’ He told me, ‘That’s their problem, not yours.’ I tell you, that was really good advice lah.”

Becoming a full-time photographer was also based on fatherly advice. “My dad always told me to plan my retirement at least 10 years before retiring and not to wait until you turned 55. He passed away in 1975, when I was in my 30s. Later on, about 10 years after that, I remembered what papa told me and decided that I really should get into photography properly. So I did.”

Any more gems of advice? Eric is only too happy to indulge. “My dad always told me that if you want to be different, you have to break your own rules. Today you make one rule, tomorrow you’d better break it — every time you do that, you open a new door. If you don’t do that, you will be bankrupt of ideas.”

On exhibitions. “Never repeat yourself, papa said. Once you exhibit something, let it out of your system and then do something else. If you exhibit the same things, it means you haven’t worked hard, you haven’t looked enough or studied enough.”

On ideas. “Ideas are everywhere. My father always told me that ideas are anywhere, but the only way to see it, is if you know how to look… you need the art of seeing and understanding.”

So that’s how the genius that is Eric Peris was born. The Edge photographer Kenny Yap and I are enthralled by Eric’s absorbing storytelling and we barely notice the time. As we try to get a few pictures of Eric, we rely on small talk to ease his nerves — the man is used to being on only one side of the camera, it seems. He tells us that he has kept each and every camera he has ever owned and now uses a basic Leica camera. “I don’t know how to use the functions on complex cameras,” Eric says apologetically, looking at Kenny’s intimidating digital SLR.

We bid him goodbye and he gently touches my arm and says quietly, “Can I tell you something? The best part of being a journalist is that it frees you; it gives you so much space and freedom. It allowed me to become a storyteller, and it has made me so happy. I hope it does the same for you.”

The Way I See will be held till Nov 7 at Sutra Gallery, 12 Persiaran Titiwangsa, Taman Titiwangsa, KL. Gallery hours are from 10am to 5pm and admission is free, call (03) 4021 1092 for details.

This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 777, Oct 19-25, 2009