Pier 24’s final exhibition, Turning the Page, celebrates the photobook as an evolving and challenging visual medium. Turning over entire rooms to single publications, the exhibition juxtaposes early examples of the form like Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) and Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens (1986) with newer projects like Rose Marie Cromwell’s El Libro Supremo de la Suerte (2018), Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls (2016–21), and Ed Templeton’s Wires Crossed (2023).
When I viewed the exhibition in early June, I was struck by the varied approaches to installing each artist’s gallery, and how the viewing experience was translated from the pages of the photobook to the gallery walls. One of the largest rooms of Pier 24 is given over to Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls, where play with image, scale, and placement high and low on the wall creates a rhythmic and engaging installation. In an edited selection of images from his seven-book project, we accompany Yogananthan on a photographic journey through India that takes the epic tale and foundational cultural text, the Ramayana, as its compass.
Yogananthan approached the making of each photograph in the project with care and attention to his subjects, letting them interpret the Ramayana alongside him, and the resulting images show their trust in each other as collaborators. It’s fitting then, that the artist’s installation at Pier 24 adds another layer of interpretation to the artist’s project: transposing a two-dimensional book into a three-dimensional space.
Danica Sachs: Hi Vasantha! I had the pleasure of seeing your installation in Pier 24’s exhibition, Turning the Page, and I’m excited to talk with you about A Myth of Two Souls. So how did you start making photographs?
Vasantha Yogananthan: I’m a self-taught photographer. I think that books were very important for me, as I did not go to art school. I would go to the library and just study the books by the great masters. I never thought at the time that it could become what I would do in life, but I was really passionate about it.
When I was still very young, twenty-two or twenty-three years old, I moved to Paris and found a job in a photography agency. I would be the liaison between the photographers and the magazines, meaning that they would come back from a tape, give me 200, 300, 400 pictures, and my job was to edit and sequence, let’s say, a set of forty photographs, to present the photographs to the client. So it was my school: really editing, seeing, and sequencing photographs together.
Looking back at it, fifteen years later, I can clearly understand how important it has been for me to spend almost five years editing and sequencing pictures together, five days a week. I would think about everything that happens when you start doing montage and you start putting two pictures next to each other to acquire new meaning. The more you dive into it, the more layers you can find or make into a body of work. So that’s how it all started. I think for me, it was very personal way to try to engage with the world and find my inner voice. Photography was the tool to help me do that.
DS: I think some photographers think of their work as a standalone photograph or print, and some photographers are more interested in the photo book and sequencing photographs together, telling a story. Which camp do you identify with? And why?
VY: This is a great question, and I am 100% with you, I think that there are photographers who basically make pictures as painters would do as in, you know, try to put the entire world in that one single image that can stand on its own. And other photographers like Jim Goldberg, whose work is also in the show, and all his work is usually about making pictures combined with each other. And for me, the medium of photography, one of its greatest strengths, is that it’s not a single image, it’s the sequence. The more I think about it, I just feel that painting is good at that, you know, so I would leave it to painters. Photography has a lot of weaknesses, as every other medium, but one of its strengths for me is the way you can make pictures flow together in order for them to be layered and complex and with greater depth. So, this is what I want to investigate: be it in the book or in the exhibition because I think the pictures like very much to be in relation with each other.
DS: How did A Myth of Two Souls come into being?
VY: This was the second personal project I did. The first one I did was a more classical documentary approach to photography, because it was only shot in one place with one community: a sense of place, a sense of timing and experiencing something with people in time to make pictures with them.
When I left my job and started as a photographer, I knew I wanted to work in India and Sri Lanka. My mom is French and my father is from Sri Lanka, and emigrated to France when he was very young. There was something that I could feel that was pulling me to that part of the world, and the question for me was, how to travel there and live an experience that would feel real. It was very important for me to try and understand art from that part of the world, and everything that it can teach us. Because I knew that I wanted to make art there, it was very important for me to try to understand the differences and similarities between the West and the East.
When I heard the Ramayana for the first time it felt like the perfect story to engage with the land because it was a fiction written 2000 years ago with gods and demons and humans and animals speaking to each other, and flying chariots and black magic, everything is in there. Yet, the heart of the story feels very human, it feels very close to us, because it’s mainly about love, loss, brotherhood, everything that we engage with in the course of our lives as we get older is there in detail. I thought that it could be a story to engage with the land, and the people that would kind of give me a frame, but a frame that could be very loose in order to travel and let the experience with reality teach me something.
DS: Who are the individuals in your photographs? How did you initiate engagement with your subjects?
VY: I’m not hiring them, but it’s more like a street casting kind of process. Some pictures are 100% staged. I would scout locations, I would come back at different times of the day and work really as a movie director would work: finding a scene and putting people inside that place, and then trying to let people express themselves within that space. Collaboration was really important. It was never about me telling them what to do, but it was a time to observe reality, or the way, for example, a young boy was combing his hair.
And on the other end, India being India. Almost every day I would make encounters in the streets that would feel like magic realism was happening—like the ordinary turning into the extraordinary. I couldn’t help but feel that I needed to make photographs of what was happening in front of me, things that were just literally unfolding in front of me without me interfering at all with reality. So then combining these pictures that in their processes are constructed very differently from each other to really create that one space, where in the end, it really doesn’t matter what was staged or not. What matters is only the experience the viewer has with the photographs. For me it’s about adding new layers into the world.
The greatest thing was that they all know the Ramayana because it’s the most famous story in India. So older kids will have read the comic book version of the Ramayana and then, I think it’s still the most watched TV show ever in India, that they did in the ’80s. Everybody knows it, so it was very easy and very comfortable to make the pictures with the people. Indians really love being photographed. And I think you can feel it actually in many pictures, that it was a really enjoyable time for them.
DS: Some of the prints in the exhibition are embellished with hand-painted details. Tell me about the decision to paint on the surface of the prints.
VY: If you paint the photograph, you’re going to see the hand at work, you know, so it’s not going to feel like a generated index that can be repeated the exact same way. It’s about seeing the artist’s hand, and also, at the same time, maybe circling back to the idea of combining pictures together.
When we were working on the room for Pier 24, because the archive is huge, it was very important from the start that it was not about selecting and showing the twenty best photographs that came out from these ten years of making pictures in India. It needed to be a mix and a balance between pictures that at first could look hand done, maybe not good enough to be in an exhibition, and then you see something next to it that has a very painterly quality to it and that feels very precise and almost perfect. Everything comes together to give a truer sense of reality.
DS: The exhibition at Pier 24 celebrates the photobook as a distinct visual medium, and there is a tremendous amount of consideration that went into each artist’s installation. For you, what was it like to translate those photographs into an exhibition that reflected their placement in the books?
VY: The two mediums—the exhibition and the book—are so complementary to each other, yet so different in what they’re going to achieve. So, for me, the most important thing was for the exhibition to be different from the books. Meaning, for example, that the pictures that are in the books, if you see them in the exhibition the photos should work on a different level. There are many ways to play in an exhibition that you don’t have in a book. Scale is one, for example, the fact that even in a large book there is not much you can do besides a full bleed picture or thumbnails. But it’s never going to feel like looking at a wavy line of pictures together that measure like maybe fifteen meters long or twenty meters long and then turning around to look at a single print that’s really huge, or then coming closer to look at a very small hand painted photograph. The way you can work with scale will make people move a lot in the room, and I think that’s quite interesting. When people move in the room, it means that they engage not only in their mind on an intellectual level, but also with their body, as they are moving and walking.
This is how I thought about that wavy wall layout, which I think for me is maybe the most important piece of the exhibition. When you see it from afar you can see that it’s figurative work, of course, but you can see blues and yellows and shades and colors, and you can read it almost as an abstract piece. And then you come closer, and you can read each individual figurative photograph next to each other, and then you can take another step back and read a group of photographs together. That was something I enjoyed immensely working at the Pier—the room is really big, and it makes for a good playground.
I saw this show by William Kentdridge and he said something really very simple and beautiful, like, “I experience the world and I take the world with me in the studio.” I think I really feel that with my portraits: experiencing reality, coming back at home and quietly for many years trying to make sense of the pictures that I’ve been making from that experience in time and space and trying to build something out of it.
TURNING THE PAGE
Pier 24, San Francisco, CA
April 15, 2024 to January 31, 2025
This review was made possible thanks to the generous support of Pier 24 Photography.