Jeanne Thwaites

Jeanne Thwaites was a Sri Lankan photographer and writer. She was born in 1929 in Kandy, She was at home in California as she was in Sri Lanka and was a citizen of the United Kingdom as well as the United States where spent most of her adult life. Jeanne schooled at the Presentation Convent in Kodaikanal and it is much later that she returned to university and graduated with the degree of Master of Art in English from the University of California Berkeley. While at Berkeley, she was also awarded the Eisner Prize for Prose Literature for two consecutive years (1999 & 1992).

In 1965, Jeanne Thwaites established her photography studio in San Luis Obispo from where in her own words- she set out to offer what she did not see anywhere else. Armed with a Mamiya twin lens reflex and Nikon F as her “personal” camera, Jeanne's work captures a particular time in the history and culture of studio photography before photographs became the ubiquitous objects that they are today. Her photographs are primarily in black and white with a keen focus on portraiture, especially faces- children, old people and animals. Many of these photographs have appeared in numerous publications including the Life Magazine. She is the author of Mother and Child (1967), Horses of the West (1968) and Starting and Succeeding in Your Own Photography Business (1984) -all dedicated to her children Josephine, Michael and Daniel. For Tonight No Poetry Will Serve we have a selection of digitally mastered reprints from her extensive archive featuring photographs from her books paired with the photographs of her life in California bringing our attention to a much-overlooked practice that arguably belongs alongside the greatest photographers of her generation.

Jeanne returned to Sri Lanka on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1993. She won the Gratiaen Prize for creative writing in English by a Sri Lankan for her collection of short stories It is a Sunny Day on the Moon in 1998, and wrote Murder in the Pettah (2001, under the pseudonym Jeanne Cambrai).

In Sri Lanka, Jeanne Thwaites lived on her ancestral family estate in Kotadeniyawa till the end of her life, where she and her husband remained devoted to enabling mahasammata values into action- that is, the practice of doing right for the people, and the land as a way of life that protects and preserves flora and fauna.

Jeanne passed away just a few days short of her ninetieth birthday in December 2019.