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Vasantha Yogananthan

The Promise

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First edition

In this second chapter of his project A Myth of Two Souls, Vasantha Yogananthan tells the love of the story’s two heroes.

The Promise is the second chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s long-term project A Myth of Two Souls, which offers a contemporary retelling of The Ramayana. A seven-chapter tale first recorded by the Sanskrit poet Valmiki around 300 BC, The Ramayana is one of the founding epics of Hindu mythology.

Since 2013, Yogananthan has been travelling from north to south India, retracing the itinerary of the epic’s heroes. Between fiction and reality, he deliberately blurs the lines through multiple aesthetic approaches: colour, hand-painted and illustrated photographs are interspersed with vernacular images to compose the layers of this timeless story.

This second book celebrates the love between Rama and Sita, the two main characters of the story. Their union, a festive but challenging event, is strongly embedded in the collective imagination in India and Nepal. The Ramayana has been continuously rewritten and reinterpreted through time, and for Yoganathan’s book has been retold by Indian writer Arshia Sattar.

A Myth of Two Souls will be published in seven photobooks between 2016-2020, one per chapter of the epic.
Vasantha Yogananthan (born in 1985 in Grenoble) lives and works in Marseille.
He is a self-taught photographer who is deeply attached to silver photography. The book is a central object in his practice, which led him to co-found the publishing house Chose Commune. He has carried out his projects over a long period of time, first in France on the beach at Piémanson (2009-2013), then in India and Sri Lanka Sri-Lanka around the myth of the Rāmāyana (2013-2021). In 2022, he carries out a new project in New Orleans, USA, as part of the Immersion program of the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, of which it is a winner. He is represented by Jhavery contemporary (Mumbay) and The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales (London).
Photographs: Vasantha Yogananthan
Text: Arshia Sattar
Graphic design: Kummer&Herrman
Hardcover
24,5 x 30 cm
63 photographs
116 pages
French / English
Publication date: 18 April 2017
ISBN: 979-10-96383-01-6
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