Vasantha Yogananthan

Afterlife is centred around the bloody war between the armies of Ravana and Rama. As its title suggests, the chapter 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.

From the very start of the project, my idea was to shoot differently each chapter to echo the narrative. I had the desire to create a modern iconography of the Ramayana in today’s India, and in order to do so, hand-coloured photography appeared as an interesting device. It allows the pictures to be read differently because of their colour palette.

To be honest, I had no expectations whatsoever; I just started without thinking about what I could or could not achieve.

There have been some ups and downs, of course. You can’t get going on such a long project with the same intensity of confidence over the years. But my passion for photography is as fresh as when I started the project.

I think Indian people have a deep connection to photography and the making of photographs. It’s obviously a blessing for a photographer as most people will be patient and ready to give you time. It was a challenging and engaging process to let people become actors of the pictures.

I’m not sure it’s the biggest, but it’s for sure one of the most important stories people share across India. I think it’s mostly because the Ramayana has been turned into TV series, comic books, video games… Young people don’t read the book, they watch it.

The Ramayana is a very old story, and it has travelled through time and is still here today, so yes, it can help us understand some things about India. As for your second question, I don’t think that’s the case – painting, literature, cinema, dance and music can be as effective as photography.

The collages in the book were all done physically – cutting prints and playing with forms and colours. I had so many pictures that were imperfect that I started to cut only the bits I liked. The process was one of chance and random encounter, leaving the cut-outs on a big table for many weeks to play with them, waiting for unexpected connections to happen.
As for the specific collage you mention, I am intentionally not answering as I don’t like to decipher pictures for the viewers; I believe it will only narrow down the image’s mystery and its possible readings.

I think it’s not for me to say whether I succeeded or not!

The poem is far from the original text; it’s very subversive. From the start of the project, the idea was to collaborate with Indian artists along the way in order to tell a story through multiple points of view.

I did say that two or three years ago. At that time, staged photography was all I wanted to explore because it was new to me and it felt appropriate for the project. Funnily enough, after four years working solely with a large-format camera on a tripod, I now feel like going back to a kind of more ‘straightforward’ photography. I think I will always be torn between the staged and the non-staged. I think that the most interesting zone in photography is the ‘semi-staged.’ Each new project requires its own visual response, and it’s very important to me to keep questioning how I take photographs.

I have no plans to go back to India. After eight years of my life devoted to this project, I feel a longing to photograph in France, my home country.