Amma by Vasantha Yogananthan. Published by Chose Commune.
By far the most eagerly anticipated photobook publication for me in 2021 was Amma, the final installment of Vasantha Yogananthan’s photographic re-telling of the Indian epic The Ramayana. To speak of Amma is also by necessity to speak of all of the books in the series created by Yogananthan that precede it: there is a cadence and a color palette that has been established over the previous six photobooks that comes to a rising crescendo in this final episode. The tipped-in images in this beautifully constructed work convey the last book of The Ramayana in a combination of straight storytelling, understated gestures and magic realism that borders on the metaphysical and transpersonal. As in the six previous books, Amma makes heavy use of the talents of Jaykumar Shankar, the traditional Indian hand painting artist that often intervenes upon Yogananthan’s photographs, sometimes with subtlety but here often with startling transformations; many features of people pictured are entirely painted over in bright, pure hues that flatten their roles into players as opposed to protagonists. In a now-familiar visual narrative style, the “scenes” in Amma are told by the spontaneously found willing residents who just happened to be nearby when Yogananthan was shooting. My favorite (subtlety painted) image in Amma depicts one of these temporal actors portraying the main character of this book, Sita, who is facing an opening in the earth where several enormous boulders join, contemplating both the place from whence she came and the places where fate dictates that she must journey still. In arriving at the seventh and last book of the series, most of the grand epic has been told: the hero’s journey has ended, evil has been vanquished, and the reader/viewer expects that now everyone is going to get to live happily ever after. The word “Amma” in Tamil translates into English as “Mother,” which holds a double meaning in Yogananthan’s imagining: Sita is both the mother of Lord Rama’s twin sons, and she is the daughter of the celestial deity of Mother Earth, whom she invokes at epic’s end, with a wish to be received back into the earth as she had fulfilled her life’s purpose and did not wish to live — and suffer — in this world any longer. The last images in Amma: the hole in the earth into which she vanished — signaling the end of Sita in the story — and a photograph of that same image hanging in an anonymous, sparsely occupied room — a nod to the story living on with ubiquity in the present, woven inconspicuously into everyday life, significant in its everywhereness. In Amma (and by extension in the entirety of Yogananthan’s series A Myth of Two Souls), there exists the kind of masterful image-making, devotion to the spirit of the story being told as well as meticulous craft in sequencing and bookmaking that is as rare as the number of tales worth recounting and reimagining over thousands of years.
Stacy Platt is a writer, artist and educator living in Colorado. She is the founder of photobookaddict.com.
@photobook_addict