Amma

Amma is the seventh and last book of Vasantha Yogananthan’s A Myth of Two Souls, a photographic retelling of the Ramayana, and it closes the project with the story of Sita.

The title means “mother” in Tamil. The book centers on Sita and the idea of purity, and reads the epic’s ending as a challenge to Rama, whose obedience to the rules of a patriarchal society it puts in question. The pictures range from the coast of Sri Lanka to the city of Ayodhya and the jungle of Bihar in India. Chose Commune published it on 27 September 2021 as a 168-page softcover with flaps, in French and English, printed and bound in Italy, with 60 photographs tipped in by hand. The cover artwork is by Jatinder Singh Durhailay.

Yogananthan was born in Grenoble in 1985 and co-founded Chose Commune in 2014 to publish his first long-term project, Piémanson. A Myth of Two Souls ran to 437 pictures across seven books from 2016 to 2021. It is mostly staged photography made with a large-format analogue camera and includes hand-painted photographs. The project had solo exhibitions at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne and the Chanel Nexus Hall in Tokyo, both in 2019. Amma received the juror’s special mention at the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards in 2021.