For fifteen years Jason Gardner photographed traditional Carnival, working in villages and towns across fifteen countries where the festivities remain most folkloric or least exposed to outside visitors. Rather than chase spectacle, he sought context, collaborating with ethnographers and local experts to understand what each rite means to the people who keep it. The result is not a survey of famous carnivals but an accumulation of particular places and customs, recorded with the patience of long acquaintance.

We the Spirits gathers a selection from that extended archive. Published by GOST Books in 2023 as a 232-page hardback, it accompanies Gardner’s photographs with field notes and other texts, and the book’s collective images are intended to dispel stereotypes of Carnival. The pictures are observational and unhurried, and the notes make plain how much of the work depended on local guidance and interpretive exchange.

What distinguishes the book is its refusal of the easy frame. Carnival is familiar in its best-known urban forms, and Gardner’s project is deliberate in dispelling that shorthand, showing instead how varied and locally specific these practices are. Running through the differences are themes that recur across regions and cultures, a common ground that emerges from the body of work. The scale of the undertaking is evident in the years and countries behind it, and in the closeness the photographs achieve.

Taken together, the images and notes present Carnival not as an exotic survival but as a living, complex set of observances whose diversity resists summary.