Mystery Street

Mystery Street begins and ends with children. Children playing, beaming and daydreaming. Children becoming. In his first North-American series, French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan stands next to the youth and gazes at their level.

With this project, Yogananthan makes a return to documentary photography, yet frees himself from prescriptions and pushes beyond the frame of tradition. Mystery Street works both as a conversation with the real and an escape into multiple narrative possibilities. If this body of work is mainly composed of portraits, Yogananthan’s preferred genre, it is not intended as a comprehensive portrait of New Orleans.

Set under the burning sun of Louisiana, this body of work is a fable, it says something about reality, but uses crossroads. It is a comment on human behaviors and yet a transfiguration of the common.

Vasantha Yogananthan (born in 1985 in Grenoble) lives and works in Marseille. He is a self-taught photographer who is deeply attached to silver photography. The book is a central object in his practice, which led him to co-found the publishing house Chose Commune. He has carried out his projects over a long period of time, first in France on the beach at Piémanson (2009-2013), then in India and Sri Lanka Sri-Lanka around the myth of the Rāmāyana (2013-2021). In 2022, he carries out a new project in New Orleans, USA, as part of the Immersion program of the Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, of which it is a winner. He is represented by Jhavery contemporary (Mumbay) and The Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales (London).