Vasantha Yogananthan

Workshop

08-12 July 2024
Marseille, France

About the
WORKSHOP

In each of the three personal projects I have completed so far – Piémanson (2009-2013), A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) and Mystery Street (2022) —I have tried to work with reality in an oblique way. Although I do not pay attention to labels I like to think of my practice as Post-documentary. Post-documentary work is about removing enough elements from the real to reconfigure it as fiction. It is about listening and looking at the world to intimately translate what it offers you and to offer it in turn to the viewers of your images. It means accepting that a story can be told without relying on a linear narrative. Post-documentary work requires both the artist and the viewer to accept the ‘fluid’ nature of photographic images. The participants to this workshop will be invited to think about new ways one can translate one’s experience with reality into a sequence of pictures. You will be invited to photograph in Marseille according to a set of parameters we will decide together — in order for you to loose these very ideas en route while making work. On the one hand a good series of pictures happens when one is pursuing something very clearly but on the other hand it is only truly successful when one realize that the things one was not looking for matter just as much. If one learns how to listen and to look at the essence of things with clarity then reality has the potential to become stranger than fiction.

Cecile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, co-founder and director of publisher, Chose Commune, will be making a presentation/lecture during the workshop.

www.chosecommune.com

On the final evening, participants will make a presentation of the work they have produced during the 5-days to an invited audience at an atelier in Marseille. This will help clarify what you have achieved and understood and conclude the workshop.

“The deeper I get into the project, the clearer my vision becomes.”

Vasantha Yogananthan’s (b. 1985, France) practice addresses the space between documentary and fiction. Working solely in analogue, his photographic projects are developed over long periods of time and over the years he has developed a distinctive colour palette solely based on natural light. His epic series A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2020), inspired by the epic tale The Ramayana, draws inspiration from common imagery associated with this myth and its pervasiveness in everyday Indian life. Yogananthan offers a modern retelling of a story first recorded in 300 BC, through retracing the legendary route from north to south India. He has received several awards, including FOAM Talent (2017) and an ICP Infinity Award for Emerging Photographer of the Year (2017). Yogananthan is the fifth laureate of Immersion (2019) which earned him a residency in the United States in 2022, prior to a solo show at SFMOMA, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and ICP New York in autumn 2023.

Yogananthan made his latest series, Mystery Street, in New Orleans during the spring and summer of the Immersion residency. Following a group of children as they play and explore together, the images are alert to the subtleties of place, friendship, and growth. Replete with the artist’s celebrated attention to light and sumptuous use of color, Mystery Street is Vasantha Yogananthan’s visual poem told in fragments, full of life, light, and the possibilities of youth. This series is nominated for the 10th Cycle of the Prix Pictet Prize; the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability.

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