Vasantha Yogananthan - Mystery Street

Vasantha Yogananthan
Mystery Street

Published by Chose Commune, 2023
Book size 26.5 x 29.5 cm
164 pages
Soft cover
Languages English & French

Mystery Street opens and ends with portraits of children. Children playing, thinking, and watching us. Children in the making. For his first North American series, French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan invites us, over the course of a summer, to (re)see the world from a child's perspective.

With this project, Yogananthan returns to documentary photography while freeing himself from its codes and pushing the boundaries of the genre. Mystery Street functions both as a conversation with reality and an escape into a multiplicity of possible narratives. While this series is primarily composed of portraits, Yogananthan's preferred genre, it does not seek to paint a complete picture of New Orleans. Under the scorching Louisiana sun, the work is understood as a fable, sketching reality while taking side roads. It combines observation of human behavior and transfiguration of the ordinary.

Fragments of a prolonged summer, Mystery Street reveals the bare minimum of place, time, and space, aware of the weight that figurative elements can carry. Working to avoid any overdetermination, or to interrupt the process, the photographer invites viewers to let themselves be guided by their own imagination. Mystery Street marks a renewal in Yogananthan's practice and takes a look at friendship, at the intersection of bodies and their environment.

The Mystery Street series will be exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris from May to September 2023 and at the International Center of Photography in New York from September 2023 to January 2024. This work was produced as part of the Immersion program, a Franco-American photographic commission from the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the International Center of Photography.