Howling Winds is the fifth chapter of Vasantha Yogananthan’s seven-part project A Myth of Two Souls, a contemporary retelling of The Ramayana that he has pursued since 2013 across India and Sri Lanka. Here the narrative reaches the aftermath of Sita’s abduction by Ravana: as Rama grieves, animals gather from everywhere to search for her, knowing she is held on the far shore of Lanka. Yogananthan photographed along the coastlines of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka for this installment.

The book’s method is deliberately hybrid. Color photographs made along those coasts are interleaved with acrylic hand-painted photographs, a device that lets the real and the mythic occupy the same page without resolving into either. The sequence does not illustrate the epic so much as test what a photograph can carry of it. Kummer & Herrman designed the volume; Arshia Sattar, a scholar of Sanskrit literature, contributes the text. The wire-o binding and silkscreened softcover are part of the object’s argument, not incidental packaging.

Yogananthan, born in Grenoble in 1985, is self-taught and committed to silver photography, and the book is central to his practice. He co-founded Chose Commune, the Marseille-based publisher that issued this title in 2019. The seventh and final chapter appeared in 2020, closing a cycle a reader can now consider as a whole.

The book was shortlisted for the Prix Nadar in 2019, and its 76 pages carry 70 photographs. For collectors, the case rests on the sustained structure of the project, the coastal settings, and the painted interventions that give this chapter its particular temper. It rewards attention less as a single volume than as one movement in a long composition.