Charles Fréger’s “Wilder Mann” examines a figure that has haunted European imagination for centuries: the wild man, the human who assumes the skin of a beast. Across eighteen countries, from Finland to Greece and Portugal to Bulgaria, Fréger photographed participants in seasonal masquerades whose roots lie in pre-Christian ritual. These are not theatrical productions staged for cameras. They are living customs, maintained by communities who dress as bears, stags, goats, wild boars, straw men, and horned devils to mark fertility, the turning of the year, and the boundary between life and death.
The photographs are portraits in the strict sense. Fréger, a French photographer based in Rouen whose work has been devoted almost exclusively to portraiture, approaches each costumed figure with the frontal clarity of a studio sitting, allowing the costumes themselves to carry the weight of the image. Made from animal skins, plants, bones, bells, and antlers, these garments display a diversity and inventiveness that can surprise viewers accustomed to thinking of folk tradition as quaint or uniform. The book, published by Dewi Lewis in 2012, gathers 164 color plates across 272 pages in a hardback volume of modest dimensions, a format that invites repeated handling rather than display-case reverence.
What distinguishes the project is its refusal to treat these rituals as curiosities. Fréger traveled widely and photographed many participants, and the accumulation of images creates a comparative view of European folk practice that is difficult to assemble otherwise. Individual costumes remain specific to their places and occasions, yet the sequence reveals shared preoccupations: transformation, seasonal renewal, and the persistent human wish to become something other than ourselves. The mythological wild man serves as the organizing thread, but the book’s real subject is the communities who keep these masquerades alive.
For collectors of contemporary photography with an interest in folklore, portraiture, or the rituals of rural Europe, “Wilder Mann” holds a clear place. It is a sustained body of work by a photographer with a long commitment to serial portraiture, produced over years of travel and research, and issued as a coherent book rather than a loose portfolio. Its subject matter gives it a documentary value alongside its artistic one: the customs recorded here are regional, seasonal, and in some cases vulnerable to the pressures that have eroded rural traditions across the continent. The book rewards attention as both an image collection and a record of cultural practice.
