Story highlights
- Flore-Aël Surun made portraits of shamans at a festival in France
- The shamans she met had messages of peace and hope, she says
(CNN)The moment Flore-Aël Surun set foot in the Festival du Chamanisme in Genac, France, she had a beautiful feeling, she said.
The Festival du Chamanisme, or Shamanism Festival, is an annual event that brings together shamans from around the world. Surun made portraits of some of the people who attended this year's festival.
"I was attracted to this (festival) because in my work, I always try to talk about people who act for peace," Surun said. "I really wanted to make a testimony about the friendship between all these people."
A shaman is believed to be a spiritual being, someone who is able to access altered states of consciousness to interact with and influence the world around them. Many shamanistic traditions involve shamans entering into trance-like states to perform rituals, such as when trying to heal somebody.
Photographer Flore-Aël Surun
Surun, who is from France, said she observed as the shamans showed their respective rituals to one another.
"(One shaman) will show how they get entranced and how they make their healing (rituals),