Amma is the seventh and closing chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s long project A Myth of Two Souls, which ran from 2013 to 2021 and eventually comprised 437 pictures across seven books. Published by Chose Commune in 2021, the volume takes its title from the Tamil word for mother and gathers sixty photographs, hand-tipped into 168 pages. The series as a whole takes up the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki, and follows the route its heroes are said to have travelled from Nepal through India to Sri Lanka, treating the poem less as fixed text than as a story continually rewritten. Here the emphasis falls on Sita, and on purity as a problem rather than a virtue.
Yogananthan’s images move between the Sri Lankan coast, the city of Ayodhya and the jungle of Bihar. The book’s colour is central to its argument: a chromatic scale in which the signs of civilisation thin out until what remains is closer to a metaphysical space than a documentary record. The ending the Ramayana supplies is not a consoling one. Rama’s obedience to the rules of a patriarchal order is left open to question, while Sita’s convictions are presented as owing nothing to culture; her name means furrow in Sanskrit, and she is the daughter of the Earth. The book is shaped as a circle rather than a line, which is how the epic itself is understood to work.
The making of the object reflects that care. Editorial direction was shared by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and the photographer, with design by Kummer & Herrman, a text by Yogananthan and a cover artwork by Jatinder Singh Durhailay. It appears as a section-sewn softcover with an open spine and printed dust jacket, 24.5 by 30 cm, in French and English. The tipped-in plates, printed and bound in Italy, give the sequence a deliberate pace: each image is met singly.
For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction of a seven-book structure completed on its own terms and a final volume conceived as a physical object rather than a container for pictures. Yogananthan, born in Grenoble in 1985 and based in Marseille, is a self-taught photographer committed to silver printing who co-founded Chose Commune; the book has been a central form in his practice, and this chapter shows why.
