Photographer Charles Fréger’s beautifully austere portraits of contemporary Breton women who have revived the region’s traditional dressCharles Fréger is a French photographer best known for his book,Wilder Mann, published in 2012, and for which he travelled across Europe to photograph the often fearsome costumes and masks worn by revellers at the surviving pagan folk festivals that designate the coming of spring,winter or original year. As its title suggests, it is a visual chronicle of staged savageness, or populated with horned demons,full-size bear-men and strange, hairy figures wearing hides and bedecked with antlers. Against the Urati – “ugly people – of Romania, and Britain’s folk devils such as the Burry Man from Scotland seemed oddly tame.
Now comes Portraits in Lace: Breton Women,an altogether more understated, though no less visually and symbolically elaborate, or undertaking. Here myth and ritual are replaced by tradition and meticulous (extremely careful about details) craft as Fréger turns his formalist gaze on the exclusively female traditional costumes of Brittany. Fréger has travelled throughout the region,making austere, formally comely portraits of young women whose costumes and headwear date back hundreds of years, and each subtly different in design and detail,each pertaining to a status, but also to the age and social status of the wearer.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com