Afterlife by Vasantha Yogananthan. Published by Chose Commune.
Culminating with its seventh and final chapter next year, Vasantha Yogananthan's ambitious set of books A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) is inspired by the epic tale The Ramayana, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India.
Afterlife, the sixth book in the artist's long-term series, is centered around the bloody war between the army of Ravana and Rama. The works in Afterlife are a visual departure from some of Yogananthan's past projects — equally beautiful but much darker, a product of shooting with flash at night and a reflection of the book's central themes of death and reincarnation.
Afterlife includes a poetic text by Indian writer Meena Kandasamy that carries this tone. In his studio, Yoganathan also mixes several images together through collage and the overlaying of pages, to further disorient the viewer. While the photographs were all made at Dussehra, the Indian festival that celebrates the victor of good over evil, the artist notes that it wasn't so much an attempt to document but to focus deeply "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."
Honorable Mentions:
ciprian honey cathedral by Raymond Meeks
Centralia by Poulomi Basu
Shane Lavalette is an American photographer and the director of Light Work, a non-profit photography organization that supports emerging and under-represented artists working in photography. Lavalette's own work has been shown widely and he is the author of four photobooks: One Sun, One Shadow [Lavalette, 2016], Still (Noon) [Edition Patrick Frey, 2018], LOST, Syracuse [Kris Graves Projects, 2019], and New Monuments [Libraryman, 2019]. Lavalette lives and works in Upstate New York.
www.shanelavalette.com
@shanelavalette