French photographer Charles Fréger’s portrait work explores issues of participation with social subcultures, their history, and aspects of group membership. Inspired by Krampus runs in and around Salzburg in 2009, Fréger began a Europe-wide, eighteen-country research of similar ritual acts and pagan traditions dealing with seasons, fertility rituals, and life and death.
His current photographic work addresses the theme of the “Wild Man“ and the associated visible transformation from man to monster – a cultural phenomenon that has been mythologically embedded in many European peoples for centuries. It is the alien that shockingly subverts our civilizational organization of life, since it can neither be classified nor domesticated. “It gives us an inkling that our stable aesthetic, intellectual and civilizational dressings are but whitewash over the jagged formations of our enigmatic and abysmal existence“ (Dr. Matthias Burchardt).

To illustrate Fréger’s working process, the exhibition shows examples from the portrait series “Winner Face“ (2002) and “Hereros“ (2007) in addition to “Wilder Mann“.