Jan 2025 – Luca Fiore | Writing on Contemporary Art and Photography

by Luca Fiore

Vasantha Yogananthan is the golden boy of French photography. Born in Grenoble in 1985 to a Sri Lankan father and a French mother, he is now one of the most compelling voices on the international scene. Mystery Street, his latest body of work, published in 2022 by Chose Commune, was exhibited at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris and the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2023, one of the images from the project was chosen as the poster for Paris Photo, the most important photography fair in the world. His work is represented by The Photographers’ Gallery, the UK’s first public gallery dedicated to photography, founded in 1971. Last summer, Les Rencontres d’Arles dedicated a solo exhibition to him: Le Passé Composé.

Yogananthan is self-taught. He first picked up a camera at 16 and has never put it down since. After graduating with a degree in History from Grenoble, he cut his teeth as an editor at a photo agency in Paris. Then, in 2009, he took the leap and devoted himself full-time to his personal work. His first project was titled Piémanson, after the name of the last wild beach in Europe, where thousands of people would spend their summers camped out, creating a sort of utopian city. “I was trying to find my voice as an artist and had in mind the documentary photography of Paul Strand and Chris Killip. I was after that same clarity and precision, which doesn’t need gimmicks to captivate the viewer.” For four years, Vasantha returned to the Camargue and, using a large-format camera, made color images of the camp and its inhabitants in the soft light of dawn and dusk. Once the work on Piémanson was finished, he decided to head to India. He didn’t know it then, but it would be an adventure that would last eight years and lead him to publish seven books.

“Everyone thinks I went East in search of my roots, but that’s not the case,” the artist explains. “The truth is, I’m one hundred percent French, both culturally and in lifestyle. My father arrived in France as a child, and at that time, immigrants were forbidden from speaking their native language to their children.” And yet, the Yogananthan household was full of books on Indian art, which fascinated Vasantha as a boy. “I was drawn to that kind of imagery, so different from anything you could see in the museums of my city. The trip to India probably came from the desire to understand better a visual language that felt both familiar and foreign to me.”

He packed many books of history and literature for the trip. Among them was the Rāmāyana, the ancient epic poem that is a pillar of Indian culture. He began reading it and discussing it with the people he met: “Everyone I spoke with referred to the story in a very interesting and personal way.” Something clicked for him, and he decided that his images would be his own version of the Rāmāyana. That is, the work on India wouldn’t be a documentary effort but a work of imagination. His journey thus took a new direction, as he began visiting the towns, villages, and small cities mentioned in the poem. This led to the first three books—chapters in a project titled A Myth of Two Souls: Early Times, The Promise, and Exile. These are ethereal landscapes, scenes of everyday life, men, women, and children of contemporary India. The photographs alternate with a text that narrates the mythical story of Prince Rama. The palette of the images is made up of pastel colors. Many of the images are staged. Sometimes the portraits echo the look of vintage photographs—black-and-white images hand-colored. “Halfway through the project, I wondered whether I had exhausted the material and should stop,” Yogananthan continues. “It could have easily remained a trilogy, but I realized the work wasn’t finished yet.” So four more chapters and corresponding books were born: Dankara, Howling Winds, Afterlife, and Amma.

By the end of his ten-year Indian journey, the photographer’s approach had been completely transformed: “As I delved deeper into the work, I realized that a documentary approach couldn’t capture what I had before me, or the experience I was having.” It’s a conclusion shared by several photographers who come from photojournalism—two names among many: Magnum Photos members Gregory Halpern and Carolyn Drake. “To talk about the real world, you can’t just document. If what you do is too close to reality, you fail. What you get is a document tied to a place and a moment in time. I’m not saying that’s not interesting or doesn’t have value. But for me, it’s not enough.” Vasantha gives the example of another major figure in contemporary photography, the British photographer Paul Graham: “If you look at A Shimmer of Possibility, it becomes very clear. Apparently, he’s documenting a slice of American life—for example, a man walking to the supermarket. It’s a Cartesian approach. Sure, it speaks of society and its problems. It tells a piece of daily life. And yet it’s not just that—it manages to say something more.”

Looking at Mystery Street, his latest book, Yogananthan’s work seems to have taken yet another step. It is no longer a long-term project, but rather the result of a three-month residency funded by the Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès, which invites French photographers to work in the United States, and American photographers to develop projects in France. Vasantha chose to go to New Orleans with an idea he’d had for some time: working with children. For the first time, he did not use a large-format view camera, but a medium-format one, which can be used without a tripod. “When I tell colleagues what camera and lenses I used, they don’t believe me. Technically, shooting handheld at such close distances is very difficult. You risk coming back with nothing. But I did it on purpose. I wanted to go there with the wrong equipment to force myself out of my comfort zone.” The result is not a project about the city, but about the experience of childhood. Games, running, being outdoors. The artist’s gaze avoids the typical sentimentality of images of children, and yet it is far from impassive. There is energy, physicality, the freshness of a gang of kids roaming the streets. There is no ambition to analyze the social or urban wounds of a city that had to recover after Hurricane Katrina. But there is something more: it offers the possibility to feel what, once we grow up, we know will never come back. “It may sound banal, but the question I ask myself while working is: how can I speak about my experience of the world? The challenge is to create images that are both specific and universal. Rooted in a particular reality, yet timeless.”

His latest project, Le Passé Composé, marks the beginning of another long-term journey, this time close to home, in Provence (the photographer now lives in Marseille). Here, the artist focuses on an elderly woman who lives in a near-fairytale house. The lights, colors, and atmospheres tell a story that is as real as it is a product of the photographer’s imagination. And yet so real… In literature, where invention has always reigned supreme, if the subject matter is real, we call it “non-fiction.” Photography, a much younger discipline, built its status on its privileged relationship with reality. Now, however, some want to use it as the written word has long been used—where, to truly express the truth of things, the stories must be invented. What name should we give to this kind of practice? This—and much more—is what Vasantha Yogananthan will discuss at Gallerie d’Italia, on Tuesday, January 28 at 6 PM.

Domani, 27 January 2025

by Luca Fiore

It seems impossible, but it happened. The most cited book in the history of Italian photography—the one most studied, discussed, debated, and even mythologized—had been out of print for decades, long before the debate around it even began. Anyone who wanted to leaf through a copy had to fork out a four-figure sum. Last year, on the fortieth anniversary of its publication, the auction house Finarte sold two copies: one went for €3,096 in April (initial estimate €1,000–1,500), the other for €1,806 in December (estimate: €1,200–1,800). Almost no one among those who had studied or discussed it could actually afford it. Its title is Viaggio in Italia (Journey through Italy), and it is the catalogue of the eponymous group exhibition that, in 1984, brought together around twenty photographers at the Pinacoteca of Bari (the exhibition later traveled to Genoa, Ancona, Rome, Naples, and Reggio Emilia). Half of those photographers are now regarded as the founding generation of the so-called “new Italian landscape.”

The project was orchestrated by Luigi Ghirri, who gathered the best talents around and selected their work. The contributors, listed alphabetically as they appeared beside the physical map of Italy on the cover, were: Olivo Barbieri, Gabriele Basilico, Gianantonio Battistella, Vincenzo Castella, Andrea Cavazzuti, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Vittore Fossati, Carlo Garzia, Guido Guidi, Luigi Ghirri, Shelley Hill, Mimmo Jodice, Gianni Leone, Claude Nori, Umberto Sartorello, Mario Tinelli, Ernesto Tuliozi, Fulvio Ventura, and Cuchi White. The 86 photographs were introduced by essays from Carlo Arturo Quintavalle and Gianni Celati.

It’s as if, for forty years, anyone wanting to read and study The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) had been unable to buy a copy. The comparison with Manzoni is no accident: Viaggio in Italia bears witness to the birth of a new Italian visual language. It’s a literary language—cultivated yet accessible—formed not by washing the Alinari postcards “in the Arno,” but in the waters of the Hudson or the Mississippi. An alphabet of deeply Italian images, seen with a different gaze, informed by trends that had already solidified in the United States by the early 1970s. Less Henri Cartier-Bresson, more Walker Evans. As the book’s dust jacket puts it: Viaggio in Italia was born of the need to embark on a journey into the new Italian photography, specifically to see how a generation of photographers—having put aside the myths of exotic travel, sensational reportage, formalistic analysis, and presumed or forced creativity—turned their gaze toward the reality and landscape around them.”

From the outset, it’s made clear that the journey was not through Italy as a territory, but through the new kind of photography being made in the country at that time. A new way of seeing.

Today, the book is back in bookstores, reissued by Quodlibet as an anastatic reproduction of the 1984 edition, originally printed by Il Quadrante in Alessandria. The cover price is remarkably accessible for a book of this kind: €42. The initiative was promoted and realized by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello Balsamo, in collaboration with the Luigi Ghirri Estate. The volume quickly became mainstream, climbing Amazon rankings and proudly appearing on Feltrinelli bookstore shelves across Italy, ready to become a Christmas gift. The challenge now is to ensure that, having finally made it back to bookstores, it stays there—as it should, for any great classic. Anyone beginning to study photography—or even simply hoping to understand that crucial episode in Italy’s visual culture—must be able to access this book, even after the hype fades.

That’s how it works for the great books of the American canon. New York’s MoMA keeps in print American Photographs by Walker Evans, The Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen, William Eggleston’s Guide edited by John Szarkowski. This year, for the centenary of Robert Frank’s birth, Aperture republished The Americans and, for under $50, offers Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore, and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin—all cornerstones of American photographic history. A few months ago, a new edition of Images à la Sauvette by Henri Cartier-Bresson came out, published by the Fondation HCB, along with its American twin The Decisive Moment, from Thames & Hudson. In recent years, London-based publisher MACK has reissued, among other classics, Paul Graham’s “English trilogy”: A1 – The Great North Road, Beyond Caring, and Troubled Land. All of them—at least as far as photography books allow—are priced affordably.

These are almost always publications that faithfully replicate the original editions: not just the number and sequence of the photographs, but also the format and—if present—the critical apparatus. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. A book allows an artist to definitively fix a body of work, conceived not as a “best of” selection, but as a coherent visual sequence—a true text in its own right. It’s true that photography has seen more Arbasinos—revising their own works over time—than Manzonis. With today’s advances in printing technology, high-quality editions are much more affordable, and artists are tempted to revisit earlier work and present a “more definitive” version than what they published years earlier, when money and visibility were limited. And yet, the great masterpieces endure. With rare exceptions—like The Family of Man or William Eggleston’s Guide—these are not exhibition catalogues, but works intended to be experienced in the privacy of one’s home, in a tête-à-tête that resumes each time the book is taken off the shelf.

Technically, Viaggio in Italia would fall under the category of exhibition catalogue, as we’ve said. However, one of the participating photographers, Giovanni Chiaramonte—one of Ghirri’s closest friends at the time—was convinced that the exhibition, and thus the book that resulted from it, originated “as a personal poetic intention—unique, singular, unrepeatable, like all poetic intentions.” Chiaramonte recalled that, in the May 1982 supplement of Progresso Fotografico, Ghirri had written a text made entirely of quotations, titled “After Ten Years of Photography” (now included in Nothing Ancient Under the Sun – Writings and Interviews, Quodlibet, 2021), pulling from Hofmannsthal, Novalis, Fielding, Canetti, Lichtenberg, Hobbes, and Karl Kraus. “With the same method and the same spirit,” Chiaramonte wrote, “Luigi also composed the different visual chapters of Viaggio in Italia, selecting and sequencing the images from various photographers—not a single one of them made under the obligation of public or private commissions, but solely from an inner poetic necessity.” The artist-as-curator’s hand (a sort of player-coach) is evident even in the titles of the exhibition and book’s sections, such as: “As Far as the Eye Can See,” “Of Place,” “No One in Particular,” “Closed at Sunset,” “Giotto’s O.” Ghirri skillfully mixed black-and-white and color images from artists with vastly different backgrounds, yet the result is a harmonious whole. Mario Cresci was known for his black-and-white experiments in Basilicata, almost the opposite of Olivo Barbieri’s Emilian interiors and nocturnes. Basilico’s Enlightenment-inspired portraits of Milanese factories were, in theory, miles apart from the Mediterranean and ancestral sensibility of Mimmo Jodice. What could Chiaramonte’s mysticism have in common with Castella’s cool, formal photography? Or Guidi’s quest for revelation with Ventura’s love for mystery? Each artist’s trajectory before and after Viaggio seems entirely personal. This wasn’t a school like Düsseldorf—no common masters to be found. The closest parallel is perhaps the so-called New Topographics, a group of American photographers brought together in a 1975 exhibition in Rochester, NY, subtitled “Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Like Viaggio in Italia, that show shaped more than one generation—despite the fact that hardly anyone actually saw it. And like in Italy, some of the American photographers later diverged sharply from those original premises (Nicholas Nixon, for example). There, too, strange alchemies. Unpredictable artistic and human journeys.

Guido Guidi—now the most internationally recognized living photographer from the group—recently said of Ghirri: “Luigi deserves to have every photographer today kiss his feet. But hagiographies only do him harm.” It’s a quip that, while expressing affectionate respect for a friend and colleague, also reveals a kind of unease—perhaps born from the success of Viaggio in Italia itself. Many of the photographers involved seem burdened by the sense that their work was flattened into the framework Ghirri conceived. The tendency to turn a lucky episode into a critical category. The institutional obligation to show up every ten years (last year was the third round) for commemorative events—exhibitions, documentaries, debates about a bygone time. The discomfort of waiting until you’re 80 for a contemporary art museum to take notice of your work.

But such is the fate of pioneers. Those who blaze trails never have it easy. And the news that Viaggio in Italia is back in bookstores—and selling well—is the best thing that could have happened in the small, underfunded world of contemporary Italian photography. It means that this chapter has been historicized, acknowledged, passed on to future generations. Now we can say: “Want to understand Italian photography? Start here.” And having, at last, drawn public attention beyond the niche, we can move on—to what came after. To identifying those who, in the murky and disheartening limbo of “mid-career,” are worth watching. Those who learned from the extraordinary generation of Viaggio in Italia and then moved beyond it, developing a personal style. Those who turned to other sources and succeeded in creating a new language capable of communication. Because another problem with Viaggio in Italia’s success is that it may have unintentionally strengthened the idea that Italian photography can only be about landscape. True, the golden men who led the revolution brought something special to that genre. But not all of them practiced it consistently. The near-obsessive emphasis on the “Italian landscape” hasn’t helped the generations that followed. So let’s move forward—without falling into the trap of thinking we need a new Ghirri or a new Viaggio in Italia to keep going.

Il Foglio, 4 January 2025