Customs and traditions: the originality of Estelle Hanania's work lies in the way she looks at European vernacular rites. Unlike the anthropologist or the pure documentarist, she tries neither to understand nor to decode their mystery, letting them pass through her camera instead. A procession of giants in a field, a magician in a parking lot, a wild cave: the shadows of a singular identity stand as a non-exotic setting and yet reveal themselves as a hallucination. She is not afraid of the pure aesthetics of the clothes or the masks, and knows how to keep a human distance from her subject, in natural light and in silence. Her frames are portraits and landscapes of men becoming animals or plants — chimerical figures embodied in our absurd contemporary world. In the background a car, a road, a car park: banal infrastructures and unspectacular places, extraordinary rituals held in an ordinary community. This first monograph gathers six sets made in Switzerland, Bulgaria, the Basque Country, Italy and Austria between 2006 and 2011.