LUX was commissioned by the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg. During the three years between the initial commission and the opening of the museum, Fréger had time to pay many visits to the country and to bring extra depth and breadth to this series. As he travelled around the country, he got to know a wide variety of groups in their different environments: dance schools, riding schools, choirs, brass bands, football clubs, drum majorettes, swimming clubs, and also the army. These encounters made it possible for him to evoke a plethora of activities and a healthy vitality that ran counter to the generally accepted image of Luxembourg as a country in search of an identity, populated by bank clerks. The scope of the project, with its many subsets, makes LUX a good example of the photographic territories that Fréger has made his own. Working with these subjects, whom he had been familiar with for a good number of years now, he took liberties with his shooting protocol – he experimented. For example, he made his first portraits of people on horseback, paving the way, incidentally, for the later series Empire; he confined himself strictly to the profile of dancers; he also placed his models in their natural surroundings, the swimming pool, for example, with those female swimmers, their heads on the surface of the water and their bodies lost in a blue limbo. As Charles Fréger moved around Luxembourg making a record of its communities, he was also drawing a map of his own photographic territory and adding new features to it.
