Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage

Charles Fréger's Wilder Mann catalogues one of Europe's stranger and oldest living traditions. Men dress as beasts, straw giants, and horned spirits for winter masquerades that survive in villages from Portugal to Bulgaria.

Fréger spent two winters, 2010 and 2011, traveling through nineteen European countries. He photographed around fifty of these costumed figures. Most are tied to pre-Christian solstice and Carnival rites that predate the church holidays now layered over them. He shot each figure alone, in daylight, against a plain outdoor backdrop. The method is flat and frontal. It treats a straw bear or a horned Krampus with the same deadpan attention as a passport photograph. Dewi Lewis Publishing released the book in 2012, with an accompanying text by the novelist Robert McLiam Wilson and graphic contributions from Geneviève Gauckler.

Fréger was born in France in 1975. He has built his career around long-running typological series that photograph groups defined by a shared uniform or role: sailors, wrestlers, cheerleaders. He extended the method into later projects like Yokainoshima, on Japanese festival costumes, and Cimarrón, on Latin American masquerade traditions. Wilder Mann remains the series that established that approach and his best-known body of work.