Wilder Mann, meaning "Wild Man" in German, by Charles Fréger began across Europe in 2010–11 as an expanding study of figures from winter and spring masquerade traditions.
The project grew from Fréger's 2009 encounter with Krampus runs around Salzburg and extends his earlier investigations of uniforms, clothing, and collective belonging. Its half-human, half-animal figures allow him to examine animality, masking, community, and the unstable boundaries between civilized and wild, human and nonhuman, life and death. The masquerades belong largely to European calendars shaped by Carnival, Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Catholic and Orthodox observance, and older seasonal, agrarian, and pre-Christian or pagan associations with danger, fertility, and renewal. Fréger summarizes their recurring movement as "chasing death, chasing the winter, welcoming the spring." Yet he rejects nostalgia and treats anthropology as a reference rather than a discipline, calling his inventory poetic rather than scientific.
Across the color photographs, individual celebrants and groups stand at full length in fields, forests, snow, and other broad outdoor settings selected near their communities. Fur, skins, straw, moss, lichen, cloth, feathers, bones, bells, horns, and antlers bury the body and shift portraiture away from individual likeness toward the overall form and material presence of the figure. Fréger made the pictures outside festival action, matching costume, posture, landscape lines, color, and material in carefully composed tableaux.
Fréger first allowed participants to assume their own poses, then adjusted stance, expression, and the relationship between figure and setting, sometimes intervening in very small details of the surrounding landscape. Some figures face the camera, others turn away, and deliberate omissions interrupt any claim to completeness. The resulting stillness shifts attention from performance to the physical fact of disguise.
An exhibition at FOTOHOF Galerie in Salzburg opened in December 2011, followed by a coordinated 2012 photobook published in France, Germany, Italy, and England and a Japanese edition in 2013. The English volume, Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage, reached a fourth reprint in 2016. Presentations at Museo Vasco, Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, MAC/VAL, FoMu, Yossi Milo Gallery, and Kunstsammlung Jena sustained the project's international circulation. The Hermès photography-support program backed Fréger from 2012 to 2023, and its exhibitions preceded his travel to Japan for the subsequent Yokainoshima project.
