Estelle Hanania

We worked together for the first time in Berlin as part of a workshop residence for Sang Bleu, a magazine that was publishing its second issue at the time. We were immediately hooked even if we are very different. I liked his aesthetics, his drawing work. He was at the same time a painter, a draftsman, and he also made collages, distorted things… My work is often linked to masks, to body painting, to things that somewhat deform the human body. His work triggered a lot of things in my imagination. This project did us both good: it built forms, a bit like sculpture, and I got to give my interpretation of them through photography. It was a dialogue.

I’ve tried painting, yes, but I’ve always done some drawing. With painting, there were limitations, and I found with photography a kind of efficiency that allows me to work with my expectations. I have a twin sister who draws and paints a lot. In my creative process with drawing, painting and photography, I realized that my pleasure, as a photographer, is not to find light. What matters when I create an image is the subject, the form, the composition.

That’s true, and yet I never really thought about it. I didn’t really have any photographic training, I had been accepted at the Gobelins school but since I was already at the Beaux-Arts, I decided not to go to two schools. So I wasn’t influenced by technicality, and I focused on what I was photographing. My subjects often already have something enigmatic, I do not want to add anything artificial that would compromise them. I think my subjects have something to say about me, and it will always be the case over time: I’m eventually going to draw a portrait of myself without wanting to. That’s what I’ve been thinking all along.

I think the photographers you quote are quite different. My meeting with Camille was decisive. She started to be published very young, and I already knew her work when I was in high school. I met her more than ten years ago and I still find her really atypical in the world of photography. She’s always present and faithful to her aesthetics, and her work gets copied all the time. I don’t think there is a “school”. Photography is a fairly solitary practice for me and I have never studied it so I have never belonged to a particular group of photographers or been influenced by a teacher or a certain type of images.

I wish I could! When I was younger, I dreamed of travelling, of discovering new things, and somehow that’s what I do in other ways. Each series is a journey, I think in particular of all my projects in Europe. Artists like Cameron Jamie, more in contemporary art than photography, had begun to explore these territories. In 2005, when I undertook research for my travels, it wasn’t that simple. Then we saw a surge of interest for “exploration”. Exoticism has always frightened me, that’s why I’ve always gone to places that may seem supernatural but that are set in a context that I recognize. I love the work of Les Blank, an American documentary filmmaker who died perhaps two years ago. He is known for making a documentary about Werner Herzog during the shooting of “Fitzcarraldo” in the Amazon forest. He has made many documentaries like this one but also some on subjects like women with front teeth apart, or garlic in New Orleans. He always finds a way to make his subjects exciting and is one of those people who explore universes close to them but who make discover incredible things. In this sense, I am in permanent discovery. I work instinctively, so there is indeed an exploration of things, and of myself.

Nature is present in my work, almost in spite of myself, actually. The subjects I go to often have a link with the cycle of the seasons. It is more precisely the case of the costumes or rituals that I’ve been able to photograph. In this sense, one can say I work with nature, and I would even say with the movement of the world. I’m not fighting it. For example, the costumed events take place at the winter solstice, and I go there almost every year. I try to blend into the cycles of the world.

It’s a long-term job. I try to always get inspiration from new places. It is as if I had several rails, all this work on traditions that I started and that I continue because it is pleasant and varied, there were other subjects like Happy Purim, rather punctual but which was done over three or four years. I always try to keep a project open, I don’t like when it ends. I try to make sure that the series can meet, even over ten years. In an exhibition, I can very well mix a recent photo with the still life I presented at the Hyères Festival. And it reassures me, I feel good to be able to do that because I tell myself that my work makes sense. I try to make it a coherent whole.

That’s kind of the idea. Even if I love to make fashion images, there is still an ephemeral, perishable side, which, I find, is scary. You produce things and then you forget them. I’m trying to get rid of an aesthetic too fixed in an era. Even if there are aesthetics I love, I won’t see myself reproducing them. Besides, my idea is to always have a part of reality.

It’s an attraction to the wonderful. I noticed that a little while ago. It’s something that comes from childhood, this fascination for films like “The Wizard of Oz” or “The Never-Ending Story”, which begin in a banal, boring world, and suddenly fall into something completely fantastic produced by the child’s imagination. It is the definition of the marvelous: an irruption of the supernatural in the real world. I’ve found that’s often what I’m looking for.

It was very important because I was selected right after I graduated from art school. I had the opportunity to exhibit my work in a place with a lot of people there and to meet a jury composed of people that we did not have the opportunity to meet easily. And then I won the photography prize that year (in 2006, editor’s note) with Jaap Scheeren, which gave me enormous visibility. I was twenty-five years old, at the beginning of my career, and the prize allowed me to continue on this path.

I don’t do a lot of nudity, sometimes I use it to serve a purpose, when an image crosses my mind. At the time, the magazine L’Imparfaite had asked me to do a series for them and I had started to develop with my friend Sandra Berrebi a very personal series. In this series there was this image of the painter Lucio Fontana, who makes notches in monochrome paintings. I wanted to recreate this image and make a woman emerge from the paper.