Mystery Street opens and closes with children: playing, beaming, daydreaming, becoming. For his first North American series, made in New Orleans in 2022, Vasantha Yogananthan places himself at a child’s eye level and treats the city as a vast playground, working in a summer light that seems to hold the ephemeral in suspension. The series returns him to documentary photography while freeing it from prescriptions, so that the pictures function at once as a conversation with the real and as an escape into multiple narrative possibilities.
Though portraits dominate, as they long have in his practice, the sequence is not proposed as a complete portrait of New Orleans. Under the Louisiana sun it behaves more like a fable, organised around crossroads and detours: a reading of human behaviour that is also a transfiguration of the ordinary. Fragments of a lingering summer, the photographs withhold most information about place, time and space, holding back the figurative weight that would fix meaning too early, and leaving viewers to meet their own expectations.
Mystery Street grew out of Immersion, the French-American photography commission of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, run with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson and the International Center of Photography; the work was shown at the Fondation in Paris from May to September 2023 and at the ICP in New York until January 2024. The book, a co-publication with the Fondation, is edited by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi with design by Bureau Kayser and texts by Taous Dahmani, Yogananthan, Clément Chéroux and Agnès Sire. It gathers 74 plates across 164 pages in French and English, issued as a section-sewn open-spine softcover with a printed dust jacket at 26.5 by 29.5 centimetres.
For collectors attuned to sequencing and the book as a form, this is a considered object from a photographer who co-founded his own imprint and treats the photobook as central to his work. Mystery Street extends the long-form methods of his earlier projects in France and around the Rāmāyana into new territory and marks a turn in his practice toward kinship, at the meeting of bodies and their environment.
