French artists Christophe Brunnquell and Estelle Hanania celebrate 15 years of collaboration with this book published by the legendary Japanese bookstore Komiyama Tokyo, combining performance, illustration and photography.
Christophe Brunnquell (born 1969, lives and works in Paris) is a versatile artist working as much in the press and artistic consulting as in photography or fashion. He is the artistic director of Purple Fashion.
Customs and traditions: the originality of the photographic work of Estelle Hanania (born 1980, lives and works in Paris) 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. Her photographs are portraits and landscapes of men becoming animals or plants, as many chimerical figures embodied in our absurd contemporary world. In the background appears a car, a road, a parking lot: such as banal infrastructures and unspectacular places. Extraordinary rituals required in an ordinary community, a present in syncope, nested in the reality as a strange lichen growing on a concrete wall.
