Mystery Street, Vasantha Yogananthan's photography

Composed mainly of portraits set under the burning sun of Louisiana, Mystery Street works both as a conversation with the real and an escape into multiple narrative possibilities that echo the freedoms of child play. I was in New Orleans during the summer; school was out, it is that moment of the year when time expands. I met the children in their spaces, making pictures with them, at their level, to ask: how do children play? How do they engage with their environment? What is their body language in the searing summer heat of the American South? What is it like to grow up in a city that has endured both manmade and natural disasters? The participants in Mystery Street were all between eight and twelve years old, emerging from childhood, but not yet teenagers. I gained the trust of each child on an individual basis: some opened up to me and accepted the presence of the camera within a few days, others within a few weeks. Once I gained the children’s trust, I was accepted, but in a particular way because I was both an active and a passive participant: sometimes the children sought me out, and sometimes they forgot about me completely.My photographs offer a glimpse into the everyday of childhood: its routine, its repetitiveness, its micro-events. Each photograph provides a minimum of information about space, time, or place, to counter the burden of representation often ascribed to these Black communities, and to focus on the humanity of this transitional time in these children’s lives. This is an age that marks the end of a certain innocence and the beginning of integrating social codes. It is also the beginning of strong emotions and friendships. Long hours spent with the children enabled me to see the repetition of their gestures. For example, when a child puts their hand on a friend’s shoulder, it is always the same gesture and yet the gesture always varies. This is one of the great beauties of photography: it reveals things that somehow remain invisible to the human eye. Moments of everyday life that seem insignificant, or that do not retain our attention, can acquire a meaning once transformed into a still image. I see myself as a storyteller when I shoot, and I become a narrator when I edit, and Mystery Street is a fable. The photographs are both a fictional account of a fleeting summer and an insight into the fragility and resolve of humanity.