For several years, Charles Fréger, known for his works dedicated to masquerades, has been exploring the subject of regional identities through silhouette photography. The Alsatian woman with her heart on her sleeve, the dream of the Breton woman in her headdress, the horse-skirt of the Basque hinterland are among the idealised figures of a picturesque imagery, conveyed by images of Épinal adorning postcards, biscuit tins, sardine tins and chilli pepper tins. It is these figures, sometimes tourist muses, sometimes regional icons of nationalist and revanchist propaganda, that Charles Fréger focuses his attention on.
For this new chapter, devoted to Normandy, he chose first to look at headdresses, undertaking an archaeology of the forms preserved in the region, in the display cases, archives and reserves of the museums of popular arts and traditions (ATP) initiated by Georges-Henri Rivière in the 1940s.
The diversity of headdresses, wildly baroque or discreetly functional, is soon joined by tools, ‘unique objects of popular arts and traditions,’ also treated in silhouette. Sometimes taken from the museum’s collection, a private collection or the archives of folklore associations and federations, the object reveals every detail of its contours but sometimes retains the mystery of its original function.
Meetings with those responsible for their conservation and restoration, and photo shoots with dancers, feed into both the staging and the dialogue on these practices, which are sometimes vibrant, sometimes fragile, and sometimes lost. Taking place in this suspended moment between a bygone past and contemporary resurgence, the photographic silhouette invites us to explore, in the depths of its blacks, our connection to this rural imagery of milk jugs and hard labour.
