Cimarrón: Freedom and Masquerade belongs to Charles Fréger’s extended study of costume, ritual, and collective identity. Published by Thames & Hudson in 2019 as a 320-page hardcover, it takes its title from a Spanish-American word for escaped enslaved people and gathers portraits made in Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Central America, and the southern United States. The subjects are descendants of African slaves and creole or mixed-race communities; the occasion is the masquerade, staged in festivals that keep memory and history active.

Fréger photographs individuals in vivid dress: silks and cottons combined with woven fibers, leaves, feathers, and body paint. The props are deliberate and unsettling—ropes, sticks, guns, and machetes, emblems of slavery and slave masters. These are not neutral costume records. The sitters’ poses and the accumulations of material carry the double charge of celebration and historical reckoning, and the series moves between remote regions without reducing them to a single style.

Accompanying texts by specialists in social anthropology give ethnographic and historical context, so the portraits are seen within the long aftermath of escape, community formation, and cultural reinvention. The book’s structure lets the images hold their own while the essays clarify terms and histories. Fréger’s serial approach belongs to contemporary documentary portraiture, yet the work resists being read only as typology; it records real people whose collective memory and folk imagination challenge expectations.

For a serious collector, the book’s significance lies in this combination: a sustained photographic project, a specific historical subject, and an editorial apparatus that treats masquerade as living knowledge rather than exotic spectacle. The 2019 Thames & Hudson hardcover is substantial enough to present the series across regions and to keep the portraits in dialogue with the scholarly texts. It is a considered addition to collections on portrait photography, carnival and masquerade, and the visual culture of the African diaspora.