Afterlife is the sixth chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s long-term project A Myth of Two Souls, a modern retelling of the epic tale The Ramayana. The project retraces the legendary route from north to south India and is informed by the notion of a journey in time and space. This chapter is centered around the bloody war between the army of Ravana and the army of Rama, and, as its title suggests, deals with death and reincarnation. With Rama’s cruelty finally revealed, the series can be read as a visual exploration of one man’s descent into the darkness of the soul.

The photographs were shot in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu over two editions of Dussehra, the Indian festival celebrating the victory of good over evil. They do not document the festivities. Instead they focus on the trance people try to reach night after night, as if during one week they were allowed to escape their bodies to become somebody else. Back in his studio, Yogananthan made collages by mixing several pictures together to put the viewer in a state of disorientation.

The Ramayana has been continuously rewritten and reinterpreted through time, and for Yogananthan’s Afterlife it has been retold by Indian writer Meena Kandasamy. The book was published by Chose Commune, which Yogananthan co-founded, with Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi as editorial director, concept and layout by Yogananthan, and design by Kummer & Herrman. The first edition is a section-sewn debossed hardcover with tip-on, 24.5 x 30 cm, 136 pages including 40 shorter pages at 20 x 30 cm, with 80 photographs, published on 18 September 2020.

Vasantha Yogananthan was born in 1985 in Grenoble and lives and works in Marseille. He is a self-taught photographer deeply attached to silver photography, and the book is a central object in his practice. Amma, the seventh and last chapter of A Myth of Two Souls, was to be published the following year, marking the end of the project (2013–2021).