This interview discusses the book We the Spirits, by award-winning photographer Jason Gardner, published in 2024 by GOST Books. The book is an assemblage of arresting photographs of masquerade characters from fifteen countries, mostly but not exclusively in Europe. Many of the masking traditions Gardner documents are associated with traditions of rural small towns and cities little known beyond their locales and are mostly connected to the pre-Lenten festive period of carnival. The interview contains Gardner’s reflections on the pleasures, challenges, and ethics of photographing masqueraders, and it features several photos from the book, four of which are discussed at length. The interview also contains the perspectives of anthropologist Giovanni Kezich, who wrote an accompanying essay for the book and was an important academic interlocutor for the book’s preparation. His research project, Carnival King of Europe (www.carnivalkingofeurope.it), has been funded by the European Union and has documented carnival manifestations from around the continent since 2007. The book is available at Gardner’s website. The interview was conducted by Journal of Festive Studies coeditor, Andrew Snyder.
SNYDER:
Jason, could you first tell us how this book came to be? How did
you become interested in carnival and in photographing these
masquerades?
GARDNER:
The first book I published is titled A Flower in the Mouth
[2013], and it’s a photography book about the carnival of Pernambuco,
Brazil [figure 2]. I had the very basic premise to do a project about
traditional music in Brazil. And when I first started doing the research
of where to go, I began asking Brazilian musicians, as well as
ethnomusicologists based in the US—a couple who had studied in
Brazil—and they said, “you could go to Rio and you could go to Bahia,
but they’re very well known, and a slightly less known carnival, outside
of Brazil, is in Pernambuco; and if you go, then look up this person,
look up that person.” And so the first time I went there was in 2004,
off-season, in October, and I connected with two or three musical and
cultural groups and started documenting them. And after about two, three
weeks of working with them, they said, “you have very good photos, but
you have to come back during carnival because that’s when the music
happens.”
Three months later, I went to my first carnival there. Actually, most of my work was not during the carnival itself; it was done in the period called semanas de pré, or the weeks before with all the preparations. A lot of manifestations that occurred were the same as they would be in carnival but with one-tenth the amount of people. And I quickly realized after the month there that I had only scratched the surface. It is very deep, cultural, and folkloric, and a pretty authentic carnival for lack of a better word. So, I went back next year and went to places I hadn’t been. And every year that I could return, I started peeling back the layers and people started inviting me to rituals and behind-the-scenes practices and preparations that made for a richer tapestry of showing the carnival. The years that I could not go to Brazil while doing that project, I started exploring other carnivals in the Northern hemisphere, in the Caribbean, in Louisiana, and a couple of other places.
After I published A Flower in the Mouth, which was much more of a photojournalistic project, and I moved to Europe, I said, well, what’s carnival like in Europe? I went to some carnivals, but I didn’t really catch onto it until I crossed paths with Giovanni and asked him basically, what do you suggest? And he really helped me to get on the path toward connecting with very traditional carnivals [figure 3].
SNYDER:
My own experience is as an American with a relationship to
Brazilian carnival, then I also became interested in carnival’s
trans-local manifestations around the world, and now I’m also in Europe
and looking at carnivals in Europe.i So, some various parallels there.
Giovanni, we heard a little bit about how Jason got to know you, but I’d
be curious for your experience, context, and relationship to carnival in
general. And then how did you get involved in this project with Jason?
KEZICH:
I’ve been working in an ethnographic museum for a number of
years in the region of Trentino, which is in Italy’s far North, near
where I live. And I really only started after a few years on the job to
get interested in carnivals due to the task of having to curate a new
museum room about traditional masquerading of the area. That was about
twenty years ago, and I was an almost complete newcomer to the carnival
field. Sometimes starting afresh can be helpful because you don’t have
all that debris of stuffy academic pronouncements in your head. And so
our team went to Pernik, in Bulgaria, to see the festival of
masquerading, which is one of the largest in Europe, and we got contacts
with colleagues from Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Croatia.
In Pernik, we were shocked to observe that there appears to be a very evident common pattern in masquerading all over Europe, something that you can describe along very similar guidelines. So we started a project called Carnival King of Europe, which has been going on since 2007, documenting and taking part in local masquerades and carnivals. Within the project, we’ve been able to witness over two hundred masked events around Europe.
There are hundreds of masquerades in Europe, but the most prominent ones are not so many, maybe a few dozen of them that you really must not miss. And obviously, when you go to one of these places, you want to be the only anthropologist there, or the only filmmaker, or the only photographer. So you tend to scorn the company of others. But then, Jason is a very nice guy, and you inevitably end up talking with the other foreigners on the scene. So we met on a number of occasions, and then we got friendly, and everything started from there.
GARDNER:
It wasn’t until I sent Giovanni my first book that he really
got an idea of how I would approach it. The thing I love about Giovanni
and working with him in the field is that he has a true passion for
carnival. There’s a lot of other anthropologists and experts that I’ve
worked with who are a little bit removed from it, but Giovanni really
enjoys the characters and the whole spirit of it. And a lot of that
rubbed off on me, so I thank you for that.
SNYDER:
It’s my experience as a carnival scholar that many people,
especially outside of the Catholic world in which carnival is some kind
of reference, don’t really know what I’m talking about. So before we go
any further, it’s probably necessary to clarify exactly what we’re
talking about when we say “carnival.” Giovanni, in your accompanying
essay, you write, “today when we look at the larger picture of Carnivals
and masquerades around the world, we see two completely different kinds
of festivals occupying the field. On the one hand, the flamboyant
parades of colorful satirical floats rebuilt every year. On the other
hand, the annual return of never-changing characters, which must always
follow the custom down to the most minute detail of their attire.”ii So could you both fill us in on what we mean by carnival here and how these
images in particular fit into this collection of traditions?
KEZICH
My feeling is that when looking at the kinds of manifestations
Jason documented we shouldn’t really talk about carnival at all because
it’s a complete misnomer. We should rather call it “masquerade.”
“Carnival” is an Italian word, which we begin to see rather late at the
end of the eleventh century, and is rather a thing in itself, a
novelty. But now the idea of carnival has got completely out of hand,
and we cannot really go back on that because everything is now called
“carnival.” But all the way up to the early twentieth century, in Spain,
for example, “carnival” was perceived as something foreign, namely
Italian, that had really little to do with the masqueradas that were
taking place all over the Iberian Peninsula. The same goes for the
Balkans, where the masked events were called igri, or plays, and, when we
started twenty years ago, in Pernik, people would not really recognize
them as “carnival.” But the word “carnival”—which no one really knows
what it means—has some kind of sticky quality to it, and now it has
gained ground everywhere in the world.
I think the real distinction is between masquerades that obligatorily must feature year after year the same characters and masquerades that are meant to start afresh every year, with new props and new costumes. 90–95 percent of the characters in Jason’s book belong to the first category, that of the ritual characters that need to come to the scene exactly in the same way as they did the year before. Then, of course, there are changes in time, but they’re very slow. They’re like biological evolution, changes that the actors cannot usually perceive.
GARDNER:
I fully agree with Giovanni. “Carnival” has become an overused
term, a very umbrella term, just for being at that time of year. When
people see the breadth of and the diversity of the photos, they say,
“you did this for fifteen years, but you shot forty, fifty carnivals!
How can you do that? The math doesn’t work.” They think that carnival
only happens in those four days, leading up to Mardi Gras. And the real
truth is that from Three Kings Day [Epiphany] all the way through Lent
is a whole season of winter masquerade. That’s part of why I titled it
We the Spirits, not “a story of carnival.”
SNYDER:
And so how did you come to document these characters in so many
countries? How did you go about gaining access, connection, and trust to
do this kind of work?
GARDNER:
Well, when I started, no one knew me, and when you start, you
just sort of show up and smile a lot. If you don’t speak the language,
you just do a lot of gesturing. But for most of the communities from
over the fifteen countries I’ve done, it’s either through someone
respected like Giovanni, like an anthropologist who has a connection in
the community, or I make a connection directly with a member of the
group that is doing the ritual. And I collaborate with them. While I
don’t pay them, I provide them with the photos for their social media or
their archives, so they get something out of it. Often people who are in
the carnival don’t get a chance to take decent photos, maybe a cell
phone selfie here and there. I’m sending prints all the time, or even
just photos digitally.
In 2022 in Basque Country, I went very last minute because it was unclear whether due to COVID it was going to open up again. Some carnivals had been canceled but other ones I’d heard on some Facebook groups were doing a limited version. I decided to go out again, and I was in a small town in Basque Country photographing and a big, tall six-foot-four guy tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Who are you?” And I said, “Well, I’m Jason.” He said, “Oh you’re Jason Gardner. I saw you on Facebook. You’re doing the Carnival Project.” “Yes.” And so we hung out that afternoon and then we went to Alsasua, which has a great carnival in the evening. And he revealed to me that he was from Silió, and he was the Bear in the traditional vijanera celebration. And so he invited me to his village the next year. Of course, I went. When the Bear invites you, you go!
He became a friend of mine, he introduced me to the people around, and I’ve gotten to know the community. I do shoot photojournalistically, but these are all portraits. 95, 98, 99 percent of the images are with a film camera, an old, slow, manual process. So every portrait is a little bit of a collaboration because they do have to sort of stop and pose for you. It’s not something where I’m just snapping it without their consent or approval. And they do have a little bit more respect when they see that it’s an analog-format camera instead of like a quick selfie. That said, my process is to never interrupt the ritual. I either do it before or after, or during a break.
SNYDER:
Well, exactly, the photographs featured in the book are
portraits, but of course when we think of masquerades, we think of them
as characters in collective festive action. So why did you choose this
mode of documenting them, and what do you think we can experience and
learn about these traditions through the still individual portraits?
GARDNER:
It was a little bit of an artistic decision because I’m an
artist and not an ethnographer. The portraits are the most compelling
for me because they are representations of what these characters are.
Instead of walking around with a white backdrop and four lights, I shoot
all with ambient light, often in the same village, which shows something
of the background, be it a wall or a garden. It was also a bit of an
aesthetic decision to separate the characters out. There’s a lot of
photos that are journalistic that you see in the newspapers, and when
you see this horde, often in Spain, of a phalanx of eight or ten
photographers snapping away, you think, “hmm, how am I going to
differentiate myself?”
KEZICH:
I don’t think I am perfectly on the same page with Jason on
that. As an ethnographer, I see a masquerade like a chessboard, or at
least half of a chessboard. You have the pawns, then you have the rooks,
knights, bishops, king, and queen. And none of these pieces makes sense
except in relation to the others. When we go to document masquerades,
our time in the field usually corresponds to that of the masquerade. The
first thing we’re trying to grasp is the rules of the game, as if it
were a game of chess. That has been really our professional obsession
for the past twenty years.
This obviously means that, on the other hand, you seldom stop to consider what the single character is trying to say on its own with its own sort of emanating force, with the magic strength that is emanating from its attire, independently from others, as in Jason’s book. And that’s obviously a completely different way of looking at it, which is refreshing for us, but it’s a bit of a different ballgame.
SNYDER:
And that’s what isolates the characters in a sense as spirits,
and the book indeed is entitled We the Spirits. Giovanni, your text that
accompanies the book begins with an indigenous proverb: “In summer, men
go out, chasing the spirits; in winter, spirits come in, chasing men,”
and so I’m curious how you both understand spirits in relation to
carnival masquerading.iii
KEZICH:
These characters are spirits, since the object of the masquerade
is that of establishing a kind of continuity between the living and the
dead. The people wearing costumes, they’re often conceived of as
deceased people returning to visit the village. And that is, of course,
something that is held over from Halloween, which is exactly that, but
it also continues throughout the winter season. So from Halloween until
Easter, you have this constant flow of figures who are not just bogeymen
to scare the kids: they’re manifestations of a world of spirits that
lies behind. In his Envisioning Power, anthropologist Eric R. Wolf
reports this proverb by the Kwakwaka’wakw of Vancouver Island, Canada,
which says that the people go out appropriating the animal spirits of
the wild as food, and in the winter it’s the opposite, “the spirits come
in, chasing men.”iv
That is exactly what still happens in Catholic and Orthodox Europe, which still stick to the old calendar rituals. Come the first of November, you really feel that something changes in the air, and you begin to have all these processions, like Christmas itself with St. Nicholas and all the saints: St. Nicholas, St. Lucia, the Three Kings. The masquerade is a reappropriation of social reality by these spiritual figures that return. And that is true even in the modern day, with contemporary Christmas festivities. So to compare this with a culture of fishers and foragers from Vancouver Island on the Northwest Coast of Canada really gives a very strong anthropological implication to the whole matter.
SNYDER:
Jason, do you have any thoughts about the meaning of “spirit” in
terms of personification and in the masquerade?
GARDNER:
I chose We the Spirits as the title and “spirits” as the word
because I’m also fascinated by the humans: why they do this thing?
Inevitably, people ask me, “why do you photograph carnival?” And it’s
almost the same question as, why do the people do this thing? Why do
they do this year in, year out? And inevitably, when you ask them, they
say, “well, we’ve always done it this way, and this is our tradition,
this is our blood, this is who we are, this is our identity,” and that’s
a great answer.
Another thing I’m fascinated by is that these ancient, perhaps pre-Christian, animistic, pagan traditions are still happening in the modern day. And they’re happening with a connection to hundreds of generations before them. So they’re an homage to these ancestors. Some people have told me exactly that, and it’s in the text of the book. The third thing I’m also fascinated by is modern trance, the fact that they put on this mask, and they transform and become the spirit. Drugs and alcohol are not really part of that equation. Some people told me at the Fête de l’Ours in the Eastern Pyrenees in France, “when I put on this oil, and I put on this thing, I don’t really know what happens. I can’t tell you what happened. I just go into this other space. It’s only when I come out of it that I will remember what occurs going forward, but that space is a little lost in time.” And that translates to me as the sort of profound way you treat the winter masquerade as a separate space. Time and rules do not matter; you kind of forget your regular quotidian schedules. And that all ties into the question of what are we, as spirits, and what is spiritual in this, translated in our modern milieu.
SNYDER:
It’s fascinating to think about timelessness in terms of both
the cyclicality of time when carnival comes back and in the progression
of time and what it means to do this in our modern world.
KEZICH:
It’s the experience of the defiance of death—“when I wear a mask
I feel almost as if I were immortal”—and that is obviously a figure of
speech, but it also reflects very well people’s experience. It’s
something that you hear many times, the idea that these people are
actually depersonalized, they don’t have a personal ego anymore, and
they become at one with something that is much bigger than themselves in
terms of the time span of human life. They become characters that
existed before they were born and will continue to exist after they die.
So it is actually something that seals a connection between the living
and the dead, which is what the masquerade is all about.
GARDNER:
There was someone in Sardinia who played the filonzana
character [figure 4]. He said exactly that: “when I wear this mask, I
can never die … I connect to ten, one hundred, a thousand generations
past.” So it’s these people personifying or saying very directly these
bigger themes that Giovanni has tapped into.
SNYDER:
So we’ve been talking about this in some sense in the abstract,
and I’d love to look at some specific images. I’ve chosen four photos
that we can talk about, and the first one here is from Italy, which, as
Giovanni mentioned, is where the term “carnival” comes from [figure 5].
KEZICH:
In fact, the Schnappviecher is a goat, not a crocodile or a
dragon as it might appear; it is actually a goat, and it belongs to a
whole family of wayward goats that are popular in Poland, with a
character called the turoń and all over central Europe known as
Habergoaß. If we remember the chessboard, the Schnappviecher can be
compared to overgrown, enormous pawns because they’re three meters and a
half, four meters tall. Their function is to scare people away. They’re
called Schnappviecher, which relates to the sound of snapping jaws,
which you can hear. They’re also called Wudelen, which is the local goat
call: “wudele, wudele, wudele....”
I must point out that the home of the Schnappviecher is the South Tyrol, which in Italy is a recognized German-speaking autonomous enclave, so that I would not, as an Italian, consider this as an “Italian” mask. But if we follow the course of the river Adige that flows into the Adriatic Sea, a little way south from Venice, there is a set of small villages near the estuary where you have characters just like the Schnappviecher called bombasìn caroling around every home on Epiphany Day to collect money. So this character evidently crosses some cultural boundaries, which are otherwise very deeply felt in the area.
GARDNER:
These guys were visually, of course, very striking. I remember
visiting Tramin on holiday with my wife. We went to have a glass of wine
in the main square, and I saw these bronze statues of the Wudelen, and I
said I have to come back and photograph them. There are many, many
characters in this masquerade. The Wudelen lead the masquerade, they
come out, they run around the square, and they are fearsome but also
super fun—almost cuddly and cute. They’re scary, but they bring joy to a
lot of people. You have to get out of their way when they’re coming.
They’re not going to stop for you. This is a great character with that
snapping of the jaws and the sound that they make is pretty incredible.
It’s not just visual.
KEZICH:
You must imagine that there are about thirty to forty of them,
and they all go together opening the way to the parade that follows.
It’s really like a very intense front line so that people would
immediately clear out of the path. This is quite usual, as you find this
kind of striking character at the front of many masquerades.
SNYDER:
I was thinking about the celebration of life that you mentioned,
Giovanni. This next figure is from Slovenia, which I see from the book
has a vibrant carnival tradition, so I’m curious what this character
represents and how it fits into their carnival traditions [figure 6].
KEZICH:
This belongs to the masquerade of the orači, or the ploughmen,
because the performance of this masquerade is actually that of driving a
plough around the village. The plough is brought from house to house in
a quest to collect a little money, some food, and some drinks. And this
character is specifically thought of as a kojič, which means horse. It’s
actually the horse pulling the plough.
Now, one interesting thing is that there is nothing overtly equine about this character. It seems a perfect realization of what anthropologists call “animism,” which is the opposite of “totemism.” “Totemism” is when people take into themselves the characters of some specific animals. So, if we belong to the clan of the owl, or coyote, or lion, we take upon ourselves owl-like, or coyote-like, or leonine characters. This is exactly the opposite: it’s a representation of an equine “soul.” There are quite a few examples in the European masquerades, specifically of bulls and cows and oxen that don’t look bovine at all; they’re just called that. These are “horses” because they pull the plough, but they haven’t got one single physical element that may identify them as horses.
Another interesting element is the white color of the attire, which belongs to the ceremonial centerpiece section of the masquerade. The face is free of any mask; they’re gentle, they may wear bells, but they’re small bells, not like the heavy bells that you find in the front of the masquerade. They’re also androgynous because they wear a sort of feminine kerchief around their shoulders. So the whole character is vested with this sort of elegant ceremonial element. They’re silent, they don’t speak, and you never hear any of these characters groan or shout or gnaw their teeth.
GARDNER:
It seems like it’s also an advent of spring, right? A
connection between the harvest? I’m curious if Giovanni could confirm or
deny.
KEZICH:
Well, that’s a very long question of whether carnival can be
taken as a celebration of the forthcoming spring. My objection to that
is that when the masquerade season is over, which is usually between
mid-February and early March, in many of these villages there’s still
about two months of winter to go, and the worst of it possibly. So if
this were to be a spring ritual, you’d have to use some wishful thinking
because you really have a couple of tough months ahead of you in which
food reserves are fading and the soil is ice cold. You’re going
headfirst against the fact that, as far as having an effect on the
climate, these rituals are completely worthless. So I’m a little dubious
on the notion of “spring rituals,” but lots of people believe in that.
GARDNER:
Giovanni did mention that they go in a group from house to
house, and the group is composed of these ploughmen and the kurenti
[figure 7], which are the most well-known characters of the carnival
from the Ptuj region, and then there’s also the baba, the grandmother
figure. So they, as a troop, go to each house; they do a ritual circle
of three times with the plough, and, in return, they receive a token, a
little bit of money, sometimes a plate of doughnuts. Especially in
Slovenia, but in many countries, to eat fatty foods is part of the
ritual, storing up for winter. They shake the owner’s hand, and they go
from place to place. This is not a parade for the whole town. These are
individuals visiting houses, specific houses on the route. And you see
this in parallel in many countries—in Bulgaria, but also in Spain. In
nearly every place, there’s some sort of ritual of visiting, of
spreading good luck and good tidings from house to house, which kind of
flows down to American modern Halloween in trick-or-treating.
I also see a lot of similarities with Galicia and the bonitas of Sande [figure 8]. So there you have the shawl, you have the feathers. It’s not the same ritual, but there’s a lot of similar things going on here.
SNYDER:
Giovanni has exploded my own notion of carnival as associated
with spring rebirth as well. Perhaps it is the memory of the spring as
opposed to a manifestation of it coming into being. The last two of
these images that we've been looking at have a relation to the animal
world, but this next one to me looks like it has a relation to the
natural plant world, and it’s from Spain [figure 9].
GARDNER:
This is in Silió in Cantabria, in northern Spain, and it’s
called the vijanera. It’s one of the earlier winter masquerades. It’s
usually the first Sunday of every January. So they sort of kick off the
season. And this is a very deep winter masquerade with 150 different
characters. And for sure it’s a celebration of the connection of man and
nature. Trapajón is a generic term for this type of natural character.
There’s the tree trapajón, the leaf trapajón, etc., and the tree man is
one of the more visually arresting characters. As an aside, the guy
wearing this told me all I want for the vijanera is that it doesn’t rain
because, if it rains, his costume becomes twice as heavy, and he can’t
move. They have the same costumes every year, just like Giovanni is
saying with all the very traditional winter masquerades. And they
usually add one new one, a different one that they haven’t done in a
long time or have never done, and so they have a slight evolution going
on because they always want to create surprise.
In the morning of this ritual, the Bear comes out of the cave, and the location of the cave is always a secret, in a different place every year. They do a specific ritual, and then the Bear leads the parade from the top of the mountain down to the village. In the village, the ritual ends after many different stops with the capturing and ritual killing of the Bear, which signals the end of the ritual. This year, 2023, was more poignant because it was the first one they’d had in three years. When I did the interview with the Bear, he said, “it’s not just a party. This is the thing that we look forward to every year. Not Christmas, not New Year’s, but the vijanera; this is our event. It’s the connection back to recognizing our ancestors.” And this is a young guy, this is a twenty-five-year-old, thirty-year-old guy doing it. Often the tradition is an oral tradition handed down. And he was the Bear because his dad was the Bear. If you’re going to go, book your accommodation as soon as you can because it’s not really a touristy place. It’s difficult to actually find a place to stay because it’s largely just for the villagers, and most people who come from outside don’t stay around there.
KEZICH:
It’s a very powerful image, and it reminds me of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth and its walking forest, Birnam Wood. And my bet, not having seen
the masquerade, is that this is the kind of character that features in
what I would call the final “Act Three” of traditional masquerades
because they’re not truly monstrous; they’re not truly scary. They are
good to laugh at; they’re burlesque kind of characters, such as the Bear
himself is. A lot of attention has been paid to the Bear, which is quite
ubiquitous in the European masquerades. But the Bear is really a
facetious character. He’s dragged around on a chain, half in jest,
because by the time the Bear comes to the masquerade, he’s been
completely tamed and he’s been trained to dance. And I believe this
mask, as the other trapajón characters of the vijanera masquerades,
would belong to this final tail, the burlesque tail of the masquerade.
But since I haven’t been there, I can only just guess.
GARDNER:
The Bear is ubiquitous all throughout Europe, but it has
different meanings and significance for different people in different
traditions [figure 10]. It was actually in Bulgaria, I think it was
Iglika Mishkova who told me that if you’re a woman in the audience
trying to get pregnant, and the Bear goes and grabs you and picks you
up, you’ll get pregnant the next year. It’s like a fertility rite.
KEZICH:
The well-wishing virtues of the embrace of the Bear are
documented all over the place, also in Poland and in the Alps. The Bear
is actually hugging women and wishing them a much-desired pregnancy.
It’s rather commonplace, but that obviously tells you that the Bear is
not really a scary figure, because nobody would like to be hugged by a
real bear. The character has been completely turned inside out. It
belongs to the character of the type of the “Wild Man” or the “Green
Man,” as in England, where you have pubs called the “Green Man” which is
the Wild Man, or wildermann, of the German tradition. They’re ugly;
they’re a missing link between man and nature—half-man and
half-whatever—but they’re good at heart. They just look horrific, but
they’re not.
GARDNER:
I’ve seen that in Switzerland and the Appenzell region too—the
half-man, half-thistle grass.
SNYDER:
Most of your cases are from Europe, but you also have some from
Africa and the Americas. I’d like to end with this image from New
Orleans [figure 11].
GARDNER:
This is a Black Masking Indian of New Orleans, Louisiana, a
place where the carnival, the Mardi Gras, is very well known; I would
say probably it’s one of the top five in the world in terms of its
notoriety and commercial appeal. Everyone in the United States thinks of
New Orleans when you say carnival, and, as a side note, when they see my
work, they are surprised because they don’t know that there is carnival
in the snow. They just know it as this warm weather thing.
But as I delved into the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I saw how there are multiple levels. There are the very well-known krewes with the floats, which often happen in Uptown in the largely medium-income and higher-level income areas and Canal Street. Just like Brazil, New Orleans has a carnival season of about six to eight weeks starting with Epiphany all the way through Lent.
I started photographing the Black Masking Indians in 2011 before the HBO TV show Treme [2010–13] had widely popularized the tradition. They were difficult to get a hold of, get access to, and work with because they’re quite mistrustful of outsiders coming in to photograph them. I showed them my Brazil work, which has a lot of feathers and sequins, and they immediately saw some parallels and agreed to work with me. In general, the Black Masking Indians are not allowed to parade on Mardi Gras Day on Bourbon Street or anywhere in that touristy area. They stay in their neighborhoods, which is largely Mid-City and MLK Jr. Boulevard and under I-10, and those are the historically African American neighborhoods. The storyline goes that the practice is an homage to the Native Americans in the 1800s that helped escaped enslaved people and harbored them. The equivalent there in Brazil are the quilombos, the communities of escaped enslaved people that became independent and rebellious.
In the ’50s and the ’60s, the Black Masking Indians could be quite violent. They are called “gangs,” and, during Mardi Gras, when everything was popping and the police were all over the other parties, they could resolve outstanding issues with knives or guns or fists that happened throughout the year. As a result of a lot of Tootie Montana’s work in the ’70s, they are much more peaceful. They’re composed of these sort of very specific roles, very much like what Giovanni was saying about the European carnivals. They play the same roles every year. There’s the Big Chief, the Spy Boy, the Flag Boy, the Queen, and more.
They hand-sew a new suit every year from scratch, and they don’t show it to anyone until Mardi Gras Day. This tradition is kept alive in a family or in a larger group of two or three families, and there’s no school for it. It’s all oral tradition, handed down, and you often learn when you’re very young. The goal is to be the “prettiest,” and I find it interesting in this hyper-masculine tradition that to become the prettiest is the goal. There are certain ritual songs that are always sung, and there are intricate coded steps and movements. “Indian Red” is the traditional opening song when they come out of their house.
SNYDER:
You mentioned the relationship with Brazil. I’m curious if you
could say anything about the representation of indigeneity in carnivals
of the Americas, which is quite distinct from the European versions that
we were looking at.
GARDNER:
Well, Brazil is a big mixing pot. It’s got African, indigenous,
and European origins, and they often take from any and all at the same
time. As for the indigenous aspect, there’s a lot of feathers, and the
big symbol in Pernambuco is the caboclo, who is a mixed-race person.
There is a connection felt with indigeneity, and I think people show
respect toward it with different symbols, like feathers and sequins.
When I was showing the Black Masking Indians my Brazil book, they saw a
couple of images and they said, “they stole my idea.” They were just
half-joking, but it did represent that these things sort of evolved in
parallel.
KEZICH:
Well again, here is just guessing because I’ve never been to New
Orleans, but what really strikes me is the extent to which overtly
European blueprints are potentially reflected in this kind of image.
Starting with the headpiece, which is similar to that of the peliqueiros
of Galicia [figure 12]. You have this felucca-type of half-moon
headpiece, and then you have the white robes.
Then you have this cockade, or knot of ribbons, which is a recurring element of European carnival attire. Then there’s this overall curved form which is very similar to that of the survakari in Bulgaria, which is also made up of aviary elements of plumes and feathers. The character, despite the claim to indigeneity, looks very familiar if one has European carnivals in mind. Still, you wouldn’t guess where a game of chess is going by looking at a single piece. So one’s really left with a desire to see what’s going on there.
SNYDER:
Perhaps bringing all this together and coming to the end: we’ve
seen all of this diversity, and we’ve been talking about the various
commonalities. I’m curious if you can make some kind of statement about
difference and similarity based on what you wrote, Giovanni, in the
book: “The object of all these antics, incongruous and strange as they
may seem, is to secure prosperity and good harvests so that the return
of these characters is an encouragement, a good omen for everyone.”v How
can we understand all these manifestations, and especially through the
examples of Jason’s book, as all part of something we call “carnival?”
KEZICH:
I would like to point out that in our work of documenting the
masquerades in Carnival King of Europe, we’ve been concentrating on the
common features that link one masquerade to the next. And this has been
a very fruitful field of investigation because really we don’t know
yet—maybe we will never know—why, for example, the ritual ploughing that
we saw in Slovenia spans from Anatolia to the Balkans, to Greece, to the
Alps, to Castilla, and England as far north as Yorkshire. There is
something very similar in all these masquerades, even at unfathomable
distances which cannot possibly be attributed to possible contacts
between such distant communities. So there has to be some common well of
inspiration from which each masquerade is actually fueling itself with
themes, with ideas, with symbols, with things to say.
Then there is a completely different dimension. Each of these masquerades is also really a very precious thing in its own right, and it has something unique, in the same way in which each community is unique. Just recently we were in Stilfs, in the South Tyrol, where we saw a huge double procession of devils marching in, following St. Nicholas, that is Santa Claus of course, as they do every year. Two squadrons of “devils” of some sort, good and bad ones [Esel versus Klaubaufen], are opposed to each other for the whole day, and they finally converge on the churchyard. In front of the church, at dusk every year, a mock, unofficial blessing is bestowed upon everyone by St. Nicholas himself, who’s of course not an ordained priest; he’s an impersonator, an actor.
On the outer wall of the church a short sequence of slides was projected about a local youth who has just recently passed away. He too was an Esel, a masquerader. So you had this moment of very high emotion in the whole group of his peers, and you could then really see that the whole life of the community is actually funneled into the masquerade, speaking the truth for everyone who lives there. So when we do this sort of work in the little communities we must not forget the local, intimate point of view. In the masquerade, there’s something really important, really precious that is of very basic concern because it contains the feeling of life and death of everyone there. That’s something that gives you the goosebumps when you’re actually exposed to it as an outsider.
GARDNER:
It’s super fascinating that people year in, year out return to
this deep ritual that’s been going on for a very long time, and it
persists. In some places, it’s even thriving; it’s becoming more popular
despite the fact that young adults grow up, move out of the village, and
potentially move to the city for more economic opportunity. They often
return back to their home villages to participate in the ritual. I
photographed a lot in Cajun country, Louisiana, after doing Mardi Gras
one year in New Orleans. It’s about three hours outside of New Orleans
in the prairies, and I met a lot of people from New Orleans who were
rejecting the commercial aspect of their carnival and wanted something
more rural. Most of the festivals that I’ve photographed were a lot more
focused on the rural experience, small villages, small towns—a bit more
remote. There are some cities and bigger towns, but, in general, it does
connect with the more rural experience. I see myself a little bit as a
bridge between these things that are happening on a very deep level and
the viewer who’s never been there and probably never will have the
opportunity to go.
I’d like to communicate to the viewers that we’re fighting against stereotype. We first started talking about the difference between the sort of parade carnival and the ritualistic carnival, and I think we’re also fighting the stereotype of the overproduced carnival, that of Rio and Venice and the ones that everyone knows from TV and other media. Carnival is not just a party; it’s this deeper thing. My work is usually consumed in three different sort of stages. First, they say, “oh, beautiful costume!” And then, secondly, more importantly, they ask, “where is it and what does it mean?” And then the third stage is, “what does it mean to them? What does it mean to their communities?” I try to address all three of those in We the Spirits.
Lastly, it’s worth remembering that carnival is very much an analog experience. You can’t stream it live and have any sense of what it’s actually like. The smells, the auditory experiences, the people coming with black oil and putting it on your face. The images that I create are a facsimile of these experiences. It’s just one two-dimensional view of a very analog and three-dimensional experience. And the challenge becomes that photographing carnival and masquerades is both a very easy and very difficult thing. The easy thing is that the visual images are provocative in themselves. The difficult thing is conveying some sort of meaning and significance beyond purely the color, shape, and form. And I hope that I’ve done that to some extent.
v. Kezich, “We the Spirits,” 217.
Gardner, Jason. We the Spirits. London: GOST Books, 2023.
Kezich, Giovanni. “We the Spirits.” In We the Spirits, by Jason Gardner, 217–20. London: GOST Books, 2023.
Snyder, Andrew. Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2022.
Wolf, Eric R. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
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