The must-see stilt fishing in Sri Lanka

We often hear about tourism driven by social media, with more and more places becoming overcrowded tourist spots due to media exposure. Weligama, in its own way, became known through one iconic photo.

The Weligama fishermen in Sri Lanka are the stars of a famous photograph taken by Steve McCurry.

“Many ask me about the photograph I took in Sri Lanka of the fishermen who, early in the morning, go out with these very thin rods to catch small fish. It was an extraordinary situation: I was driving along the southern coast of Sri Lanka and noticed dozens of fishermen sitting on stilts in the sea. So one morning, I decided to walk into the ocean, up to where the water reached my chest, and spent an hour and a half taking photographs. They would climb onto the stilts and sit there to avoid scaring the fish: this is the whole purpose of the action.” With these words, the great photographer Steve McCurry (Darby, Pennsylvania, 1950) recounted, in an interview with the publisher Phaidon (and whose video is available on YouTube), one of his most famous photographs: the one he took in 1995 of the fishermen of Sri Lanka in Weligama, a town of about seventy thousand people facing the Indian Ocean in the south of the country.

The famous shot has been featured in countless exhibitions of which the American photographer has been the protagonist worldwide: the famous exhibition Cibo at the San Domenico Museums in Forlì explored the theme of food with eighty shots, many of which had never been shown before.

“It’s one of the photographs that make up the section of the exhibition that deals with food production,” explains Fabio Lazzari, curator of the Forlì exhibition. “McCurry photographed people involved in food production worldwide: there are fishermen, farmers, ranchers, saffron gatherers, rice fields in the Philippines, and an orange fruit picker.”

And indeed, the connection between this image and food is undeniable: this way of fishing sustained the populations of this part of the island for a long time. “The Weligama fishermen,” continues Lazzari, “are among McCurry’s most iconic photos, so much so that many people still visit Weligama today to try to recreate that photograph. This, in part, is also a sign of how McCurry has influenced the collective imagination through his photographs.”

McCurry spent nearly a day with the southern Sri Lankan fishermen to capture the right light for the photograph at different times of the day. For this reason, he had the opportunity to observe their fishing method for quite a long time. “I was surprised,” he said in the above-mentioned interview, “by the speed with which the fishermen caught the fish and put them in their bags.” He then made a bitter realization: “Unfortunately, I think this way of life will soon come to an end, as many of these young people find it more profitable to work in tourism, and this unique way of fishing will eventually disappear. What’s fascinating about this photograph is that we will always look at it in the years to come, marveling at how these men fish: we’ll think that this was an iconic situation we’ll never see again, and that to preserve this memory, this story of how we were, it’s important to document events like this.