“I was in New Orleans during the summer; school was out, it’s that moment of the year when time expands. There is freedom but also boredom. It is a particular season, that of the summer vacation. It’s when you learn about yourself outside of school and home.”¹

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Predominantly set on a sports field and within the confines of a summer camp playground, Vasantha Yogananthan’s Mystery Street follows the daily activities of the summer camp’s participants. At a transitional period in their lives where they are no longer children and not yet teenagers, we see them at play, at rest, in competition with each other, and supporting one another. Vasantha captures gestures of tenderness, gazes of contemplation, expressions of elation and moments of fragility and ennui. On one level the project could be interpreted as an intimate documentary of children growing up together.

But in my opinion, what is masterful about Mystery Street is that it is Vasantha’s poetic adaptation of youth and of time going by. It is a fable left open to the multiple narratives that viewers’ might infer by looking at the photographs, thanks to what Vasantha chooses to include in his selection and framing, and more importantly, exclude.

The photographs themselves are tightly cropped, always candid and often isolate a subject from the hive of activity that we infer is happening outside of the frame. We are left with unanswered questions and our interpretations to fill in the gap. In one image for example, we see a boy sitting down with his eyes closed - photographed in profile - whose torso is falling backwards. Was he pushed or is he falling as part of a game, and why is he (seemingly) by himself?

Furthermore, Vasantha’s informed sequencing of the photographs offers little context to these children’s lives outside of the summer camp; there are no shots of parents or summer camp coordinators, nor any establishing shots of the locale. With this, he suggests a dystopian space (post Hurricane Katrina) where children have ‘become masters of a city in which adults have disappeared, of a world that has been left to them, a world that is, in a way, on pause’.²

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“As a photographer, one of my biggest battles is using the frame, lights and colour to bring abstract qualities to figurative images. I strive to remove anything that can be too illustrative, that can give too much context, that can overly narrow the scope of the imagination.” ¹

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For this reason I’d say Vasantha Yogananthan’s Mystery Street is an incredibly rewarding photobook to get lost in. It is at first sight beautiful and ethereal, but as we delve deeper we come to realise it is also sensitive and layered. I’d highly recommend it!

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¹ A conversation with Vasantha Yogananthan and Taous Dahmani in the Mystery Street book

² An interview with Vasantha Yogananthan and the Foundation Henri Cartier Bresson (linked below)