Charles Fréger’s Wilder Mann gathers a body of work devoted to a single, stubborn image: the human figure remade as animal. Across the book, masqueraders appear as bears, goats, stags, wild boars, straw men, devils and steel-jawed monsters, costumes assembled from animal skins and plants and finished with bones, bells, horns or antlers. These are not theatrical inventions. They belong to centuries-old European pagan rituals marking the seasonal cycle, fertility, life and death, and the photographs record people who still step inside them.

Fréger’s method is what gives the series its weight. He photographs each figure with the composure of a portrait sitting, so that documentary attention and individual presence hold together rather than compete. The masks are allowed to be strange; the person wearing them is allowed to be ordinary. That double register is the book’s real subject, and it is why the images stay in the mind longer than a survey of folk costume would.

This is the Japanese-language edition published by Seigensha on 1 November 2013, ISBN 9784861524059. The hardcover contains 272 pages, with roughly 160 photographs and explanatory notes on the costumes. It is distinct from the English-language Dewi Lewis edition.

For a collector, the case rests on the work rather than on claims about the object. Fréger has built one of the more coherent long-term projects in contemporary photography around ritual disguise, and Wilder Mann is its central statement: a sustained encounter with European masquerade, made with a portraitist’s patience and an anthropologist’s curiosity.