Curriculum

he French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan grew up reading a comic-book version of the Ramayana, the epic Indian poem about Rama, a legendary prince and deity. In 2013, while traveling in India, Yogananthan began work on his own retelling of the Ramayana, a seven-volume photobook called (2013–21), which incorporates spectacular pastel-hued staged photographs, often rendered with delicate hand-painting techniques, along with intimate accounts of nighttime festivals, where he had to find each flash-lit image in complete darkness. The idea of connecting contemporary India to ancient narrative, of “traveling through time and space,” is at the center of the project, Yogananthan