Photographer Jason Gardner travelled throughout 15 international locations to doc conventional Carnival in its myriad of manifestations. In search of out villages and cities the place festivals are at their most folkloric or least visited by outsiders, Gardner collaborated with ethnographers and native consultants to have interaction with and perceive every pageant. A choice of his huge archive of images remodeled a interval of 15 years can be printed in We the Spirits. Collectively, his photos dispel stereotypes of Carnival and illustrate the advanced range of native customs united by common themes.
“In the midst of the evening, or on the break of daybreak, these children flip into spirits, sporting the spirits’ garments and dealing with their paraphernalia. This provides them authority and energy for the reason that spirits are everlasting; they by no means change, defying the passage of time and, at the least in precept, even loss of life itself. Spirits are immortal and so develop into those that are sporting their robes.” – Giovanni Kezich
Courting from pre-Christian occasions, known as entroido, pust, mas, fasnacht, courir, or Mardi Gras, these winter masquerades are held from January to March within the gray space of the Christian calendar between Christmas and Lent, typically known as the ‘fifth season’. At every Carnival, the characters, traditions, masks and costumes join contributors to their ancestors and permit them to transcend their every day life. The traditions originated in Europe and unfold additional afield, the place winter masquerades proceed with the identical spirits, themes, and sequence. The images in We the Spirits have been made throughout Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Italy, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Trinidad and the US. Gardner immerses himself in every celebration, photographing characters in costume the place he finds them, typically recording their testimony and reflections on the continued rituals, working as a ‘visible anthropologist’.
“Winter and spring; barren and fertile; life and loss of life; magnificence and ugliness; gentle and darkish; ritual and actuality; chaos and order – the annual Carnival is rather more than a celebration and parade within the streets…. Profound in which means, it reinforces regional and nationwide identification, marks the cycle of seasons, and offers a possibility for the suspension of social norms, the inversion of typical roles. In a time of screens, computer systems and A.I. simulations, there’s a motion again to the analog and gritty expertise of Carnival, again to custom and to feeling one thing extra primal, animal, and pagan.” – Jason Gardner
“Clad of their official robes and paraphernalia—bells, headpieces, sticks of assorted description—these characters appear to be replete with magic, the magic of the spirits.” – Giovanni Kezich
A choice of forty images from We the Spirits are on show within the exhibition Costume and Masquerade: Images by Suzanne Jongmans and Jason Gardner at Stadhaus Ulm from 11 November 2023 – 18 February 2024.
Jason Gardner is an American photographer, based mostly in Paris and New York. His first monograph A Flower within the Mouth, specializing in Carnival in Pernambuco, Brazil was printed in 2013 (Visible Anthropology Press, USA). Gardner’s ‘We the Spirits’ was chosen as a Prime 50 portfolio by Photolucida’s Essential Mass in 2022 and has been exhibited in Paris, New York, New Orleans, Toronto, Geneva, Malmesbury (UK), São Paulo, Belgrade, and San Francisco. Gardner’s work has been printed in GEO Journal France, The New York Instances, Rolling Stone, Le Parisien, NPR.org, and New York Journal.
Jason Gardner : We the Spirits
Gost Books
December 2023 (US February 2024)
RRP £50 | €60 | $65
220 x 265 mm, portrait
232 pages, 127 photos
Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-915423-14-6