The "Avatar Amma" series centers on a young living master revered as an Avatar in India. He conducts traditional Hindu pujas in the temple he constructed in 2001 in Tamil Nādu, Southern India.

Wall text for the 2013 Group Show at ICP
Stories in the Social Landscape, International Center for Photography (ICP), NY 

The Radiance of Avatar Sri Narayani Amma

‘Artists must express the whole truth. Not only the exterior truth but also the interior one. The artist communicates the emotion he felt when facing immortal truths. That is the mystery of the work of art.’
— Auguste Rodin in 1903 when asked if he were a religious person.

This photo-essay focuses on a singular spiritual master named Sri Narayani Amma and the pujas or ceremonies conducted in the temple Amma built in 2001 in the Tamil Nādu in Southern India. Since the age of sixteen, Amma has been considered by many Indians as more than just a sage, a guru or a master but as ‘an avatar’ or a divine human being. In the Hindu tradition avatars comes down to the world whenever there is an alarming decline of truth.

At the present age of thirty-six, Narayani Amma has already affected thousands of lives in his natal Province of Tamil Nadu, so much so that the President of India came to his temple for an official visit in December of 2005. He has built the largest golden Temple in India which attracts thousands of visitors per week as well as many social institutions for his home town of Thirumalaidoki.  The ceremonies conducted by Amma are deeply seeded in the ancient Hindu traditions (the Cow Puja, the Full Moon Puja) and yet they supersede them in that Amma performs these rituals in such a perfect and novel way that Hindus themselves are amazed.

Since my early childhood, I have had faith as well as a spiritual questioning. Born and raised a Christian in Paris, I studied the scriptures and always wondered whether they were metaphors or realities. Did Jesus Christ conduct miracles? And how did he foster such metamorphosis in people’s hearts? How did he, in three short years of preaching, gather such a following?  Having lived half of my adult life in New York City, I have encountered a multiplicity of faiths and yet the question remained the same: why do certain spiritual guides like Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Lao Tzu have such a resonance thousands of years later? Were they avatars too?

A glimpse of an answer came when I sojourned to Sri Narayani Amma’s Temple in 2003. I've observed this living spiritual master in his daily life and actions during five extended trips since then. So moved am I by the meaningful beauty and unnamable effulgence of the ceremonies that I wanted to photograph them to repeatedly relive, to never forget and hopefully to share the experience of this unconditional love. This extended photo essay is my soul’s sensibility “when facing immortal truths”. And perhaps avatars, of many different faiths, do exist. They at least seem closer to the immortal truths than most of us aspirational humans. —Martine Fougeron

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