Charles Fréger explores the masks, costumes and characters created by the descendants of Africans and indigenous peoples in the Americas

All across the Americas, from the 16th century onwards, enslaved Africans escaped their captors and struck out on their own. These runaways, having found their freedom, established their own communities or joined with indigenous peoples to forge new identities.

Cimarron, borrowing a Spanish-American term for these fugitive former slaves, is a new series of photographic portraits of their descendants. From Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean islands and Central America, as far as the southern USA, elaborate masquerades are staged that celebrate and keep alive the memory of African slaves and their descendants. Stock characters are portrayed in costume, or in grotesque or satirical representations. A huge variety of African tribal dress, wild ritual regalia and shimmering Mardi Gras outfits feature in breathtaking succession. Vividly coloured silks and cottons combine with woven fibres, leaves, feathers, and bodypaint; props include emblems of slavery and slavemasters – ropes, sticks, guns and machetes. These photographs record real people whose collective sense of memory, folk history and imagination dramatically challenges our expectations.

Charles Fréger’s work has established a large and growing following among connoisseurs of contemporary photography, defining a new genre of documentary portraiture that extends and deepens our sense of the human past and the present.

Table of Contents:

Introduction • The Photographs • Cimarron: Slavery, Freedom and Ritual Masquerade, Krystel Gualde • Description of characters and groups, Ana Maria Ruiz

About the Authors:

Charles Freger is a photographer based in Rouen, France. Internationally acclaimed for his subtle and poetic portraiture, he has devoted himself to the representation of social groups. Previous books include Wilder Mann, Portraits in Lace and Yokainoshima.

Ishmael Reed is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including the critically acclaimed Mumbo Jumbo and Conjugating Hindi. Two of his novels have been nominated for National Book Awards, and his poetry has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

A festival of Indian folk rituals and costumes bursting with colour, captured by renowned photographer Charles Fréger, the creator of a distinctive and powerful new genre of portrait photography.

Internationally renowned photographer Charles Fréger continues to explore global traditions and cultures, by celebrating the powerful visual aspects of Indian folk culture and religious ritual. India is the home to a myriad of local traditions, legends and religions, each with their own festivals, rites and rituals. Celebrations burst with vivid colours and often wildly exuberant costumes, some representing gods and goddesses, others legendary heroes from Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

In Charles Fréger’s photographs, those who honour local cultural traditions are represented in single or group portraits, represented against carefully chosen landscapes and backdrops, from the heart of festivals and celebrations. Fréger’s unmistakable style of portraiture allows us to admire the complexity of their adornments – masks and headdresses, costumes and body paint – and to consider the abundance of imagination that expresses India’s countless stories and characters, both human and divine.

This spectacular gathering of warrior figures, deities, musicians, tigers, mahouts, epic characters and their avatars is accompanied by texts setting the huge variety of eclectic costumes in context, and describing the local festivals and rituals. This compelling sequence of new portraits will enthral those with an interest in folk traditions, as well as the followers of this internationally acclaimed photographer.

About the Authors:

Charles Fréger is a photographer based in Rouen, France. Internationally acclaimed for his subtle and poetic portraiture, he has devoted himself to the representation of social groups. Previous books include Portraits in Lace: Breton Women (2015), Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters (2016) and Cimarron: Freedom and Masquerade (2019), all published by Thames & Hudson. Anuradha Roy is a novelist and journalist living in northeast India. Catherine Clément is a philosopher, critic and feminist.

Rising star Charles Fréger brings his inimitable eye to unfamiliar Japanese folk rituals

In rural Japan the passage of the year is marked by festivals and rituals that have changed little for centuries. Elaborate outfits, crafted from textiles as well as branches, straw and elements sourced from the natural environment, are donned in agricultural and fishing communities throughout Japan to celebrate seasonal rites of fertility and abundance.

Yokainoshima (literally ‘island of monsters’) explores the extraordinary range of masks, costumes and characters that reappear with each returning season. Charles Fréger’s photographs combine acute documentary attentiveness with individual portraiture in an entirely fresh and distinctive style.

Toshiharu Ito and Akihiro Hatanaka, both specialists in Japanese folk culture and anthropology, analyse Fréger’s photographs, setting the huge variety of eclectic clothing in ethnographic context and describing the local festivals, dances and rituals. A final illustrated reference section describes individual costumes and masks.

About the Author:

Charles Fréger is a photographer based in Rouen, France. Internationally acclaimed for his subtle and poetic portraiture, he has devoted himself to the representation of social groups. Previous books include Wilder Mann and Portraits in Lace.