AWARDS

A self-taught photographer, Vasantha Yogananthan was born in 1985 in Grenoble (France) to a French mother and a Sri-Lankan father. While creating his first long-term Piémanson (2009-2013), Yogananthan realised that good photography is linked to the passing of time. To him, a new project always starts with an intuition, and then time makes him understand what it is that he is looking to photograph and how.

Yogananthan co-founded the publishing house Chose Commune to publish Piémanson in 2014. He then moved onto the seven-book project A Myth of Two Souls (2013-2021) to explore the space between reality and fiction inspired by the epic Indian tale The Ramayana.

A Myth of Two Souls received solo exhibitions at the Musée de l’élysée (Lausanne, 2019), the Chanel Nexus Hall (Tokyo, 2019), Deck (Singapore, 2020) and Belfast Photo Festival (2023). The project was also exhibited in group shows Illuminating India 1857-2017 at the Science Museum (London, 2017), Body Building at the Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai, 2019) and Energy: Sparks from the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2023).

Yogananthan has received several awards, including an ICP Infinity Award as Emerging Photographer of the Year (2017). In 2019 and 2021, his books Dandaka and Amma were respectively awarded the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award and the Juror’s special mention at the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Photobooks Award. In 2022, Yogananthan participated in Immersion, a French-American photography commission by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Paris) and the International Center of Photography (New York).

Artist Statements

It is an honour to receive The Overseas Photographer Award, Higashikawa Award for A Myth of Two Souls. A strong connection already ties the project to Japan, as it was exhibited in Tokyo in 2019 before anywhere else in the world. I am proud and pleased that the project will now reach new audience in Hokkaido.

Vasantha YOGANANTHAN