Customs and traditions: the originality of Estelle Hanania’s photographic work appears in the fact that it focuses on the european vernacular rites in a very unique way. Unlike the anthropologist or pure documentarist, she doesn’t try neither to understand nor to decode the mystery of those rites, letting them pass trough her camera.
A procession of giants in a field, a magician in a parking lot, a wild cave… The shadows of a singular identity are standing as a non-exotic setting yet revealing themselves as an hallucination.
Graduated from Les Beaux Arts de Paris, the 2006 award-winning photographer in Hyeres Festival Estelle Hanania is not afraid by the beauty, the pure aesthetics of the clothes or the masks. She knows how to keep a human distance to the subject, in a natural light, in silence.
160 pages, 19 x 24 cm, hardcover, Shelter Press (St. Martin).