Wilder Mann is the new series by Charles Fréger, taken in 2010 and 2011 across eighteen European countries, from Finland to Greece.
On the trail of the “wild man” and his reemergence, Charles Fréger went in search of “Phenomena”, zoic creations that reflect the primitive form of religions and their reinterpretation in pagan rituals of fertility, sexuality, death and rebirth. Bears, boars, goats, demons and other horned, hairy beasts: Fréger catalogues these “phenomena” of the transformation of man into wild beast and glorifies them in his photographs.
Half anthropology, half photojournalism, Wilder Mann is an archive of antiquity and the customs whose original traces have been lost, a review of traditional cultures from the Middle and Neolithic Ages.
It’s a monumental work of anthropological research: carnivals, winter festivities, fertilization rituals, New Year, Epiphany…some appropriations from other cultures, others not. Certain groups can have an “extremely touristy air” while others are closed off. The study of the mythology of the wild man “is infinite.”
Faced with the “abuse of the real” of our modern world and the artifice of its imagos, Charles Fréger returns with Wilder Mann to a “Degree zero” of representation and offers us an instinctual, brute authenticity through this marvelous, animist voyage.
Taken across Europe, Fréger continues his work in areas across the world.
Still unpublished, a portfolio of the Wilder Mann series was appeared in the latest issue of the magazine Le Monde d’Hermès. The series will also be exhibited in 2012 by the Fondation Hermès in two spaces dedicated to photography: the TH13 Gallery in Berne and the Gallery at Hermès in New York.
Wilder Mann can currently be viewed at the Galerie Fotohof in Salzburg through January 21; at the Museo Vasco in Bilbao from March 7 to March 12, 2012; at the Musée de la Photographie in March 2013. An exhibition will also tour Eastern Europe in 2012.
Finally, Wilder Mann will be the subject of a book available in four languages and released by four European publishers.
Séverine Morel
[email protected]
Fotohof
Erhardplatz 3
5020 Salzburg
Austria
Monday – Friday, 15h to 19h
Saturday, 10h to 13h
Through January 21, 2013
