Over the last decade, Vasantha Yogananthan, a French national of French and Sri Lankan descent, has travelled India, Nepal and Sri Lanka extensively for a seven-volume book project called A Myth of Two Souls, published by Chose Commune, the publishing house Yogananthan founded with Cecile Poimboeuf-Koizumi.

Each of the seven books comprises a modern, predominantly photographic retelling of a 'kanda' (book) from the Ramayana, a classic Sanskrit epic first compiled and put to paper by the poet Valmiki in the third century BCE. Although there have been hundreds of versions, adaptations and translations of the Ramayana, Yogananthan's is the first photographic version.

A Myth of Two Souls draws inspiration from imagery associated with the Ramayana and its pervasiveness in everyday Indian life. The story might be ancient but still has things to say about modern India, in which imagery depicting scenes from the epic are widespread.

Yogananthan's photographic journey, for which he has travelled thousands of miles, amounts to a type of time travelling, connecting the stories and images evoking scenes and episodes from the time of the epic's inception to the present. For Yogananthan, it was important to discover how to photograph an epic story and journey from northern to southern India that is rooted in storytelling as much as it is tied to the land.

For A Myth of Two Souls, he blends photographs in a more or less documentary mode with staged scenes in which people freely interpret scenes and their favourite characters from the Ramayana upon Yogananthan's request. For some people this meant they could enter a fictional space and play roles that in their daily lives would be impossible because of social or legal restrictions.

Yogananthan also taps into the old tradition of hand-painted photography, having shared another part of his authorship, besides the role-playing subjects, with one of the few remaining craftsmen in the field, allowing him to colour the photographs the way he likes yet not straying too far from visual reality. While traditionally reserved for wealthy patrons from the higher castes, this time the hand-colouring encompassed people from all social strata.

Afterlife is remarkably different from the rest of the series. It departs from the lightness of the first five books in that its images have been shot during nighttime and are situated against black backgrounds. Visually, it deviates from the earlier work through close-up portraiture and wilder cut-ups.  

The imagery for Afterlife was shot by Yogananthan during several festivals devoted to the Ramayana, in the north as well in India's south and Sri Lanka, celebrating the victory of good over evil. By shooting among the people dressing and face-painting themselves as characters from the epic (blue is the colour of the skins of Gods, for example, and black for the soldiers), the images came out differently from the register of the earlier chapters.

Using 35 mm instead of his usual medium-format camera, he allowed himself more freedom to move but also to give up control. As such, Afterlife became a transition from one world to the next also visually, meandering trance-like in the great unknown, where celebration alternates with the sense of loss and mourning and where the exuberant yet focused pictures become metaphors for feelings.

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Taco Hidde Bakker about Vasantha Yogananthan’s project Afterlife originally published in Foam Magazine 57, In Limbo, in 2020.

VASANTHA YOGANANTHAN is a photographer working around the genres of portrait, still life and landscape. He has received several awards, including the Prix Levallois (2016) and an ICP Infinity Award as Emerging Photographer of the Year (2017). In 2018 and 2019 he was awarded the Prix Camera Clara and the Rencontres d’Arles Photo -Text Book Award. Yogananthan’s work is included in private and public collections, including the V&A, Musée de l’Élysée, FOAM Museum and the Musée Francais de la Photographie. 

TACO HIDDE BAKKER is a writer, teacher, and curator in the field of the arts, specialising in photography. He studied at two art schools and obtained an MA in Photographic Studies at Leiden University. He has contributed writing to numerous artists’ books, catalogues, and magazines, amongst which Camera Austria, Foam Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Trigger. He is the author of The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain (Fw:Books, 2018), a collection of essays and other writings on photography and visual art. Taco teaches Theory at the Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU Media).