Artist Talks - Vasantha Yogananthan

Vasantha Yogananthan Talk – The Photographers’ Gallery

As a part of my professional development planning blog, I was required to attend multiple talks in regard to my studies at galleries in order to gain further insight into the photography industry and what it’s like to be working within it. I decided to attend a talk at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, online, with the photographer Vasantha Yogananthan who is a documentary photographer and visual artist from France whose work focuses on the idea of narrative and storytelling using a combination of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photography along with slight elements of fine art. By focusing on these themes, his work often links to the idea of narrative by creating photographs that resonate with myths and folklore within Indian life as shown within his project titled ‘AMMA’ which was discussed in the talk put on by The Photographers’ Gallery.


‘AMMA’ is a project based around documentary, landscape and portraiture photography focusing on
creating a story and narrative within the images based on the myths and folklore of India. More specifically, this project showcases a series of work that is created as a modern retelling of the legendary princess Sita who was said to travel from the seacoast of Sri Lanka to the city of Ayodhya to the jungle of Bihar, India. It also links in with another of his photographic projects called ‘A Myth of Two Souls’. Within this project, the artist, creates these photographs to document the journey that the princess would have taken along with combining his images with elements of fine art which is done by outlining the people captured within the photos with a colour but leaving their clothing visible. By combining these two artforms, his works takes on an almost mythical atmosphere, since it’s based on a world where civilisation gradually disappears which I feel is the reason behind Vasantha Yogananthan outlining some of the people caught within his photos in colour.


His focus on these themes and subjects within his photographic projects leads to a lot of comparisons and contrasting imagery being made since it tells the audience a story about the journey to the jungle of Bihar, India and documents all the different landscapes and areas of city life someone would see if they were to take that journey themselves today whilst also being determined to “remove” traces of civilisation from the imagery made using colour to outline their body and figures. The other contrasting part between the images in this series of work is that the landscape photographs are shown to wide and quite peaceful in the way that they are captured by the artist whilst the photographs taken within the city of Ayodhya are all very compacted and quite busy with people that the artist has deliberately “removed”.


Whilst researching the work of Vasantha Yogananthan and attending the online talk at The Photographers’ Gallery I realised a few similarities between his work and my own. A lot of my own photographic work is inspired through the themes of narrative and storytelling, emotions, and atmosphere whilst also using colour to further emphasize these themes of focus, evident in both my music and concert photography as well as my editorial and more personal photography. Attending the talk at The Photographers’ Gallery has given me a lot of insight into the way that I portray my themes within my own photography and how it can be developed further with my knowledge gained from the analysis of Vasantha Yogananthan’s work and the talk at the gallery.

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