Charles Fréger

Hardcover | 19 x 3.3 x 23.6 cm | 320 pp

Thames & Hudson | 2019 | 9780500022467

All across the Americas, from the 16th century onwards, enslaved Africans escaped their captors and struck out on their own. These runaways, having found their freedom, established their own communities or joined with indigenous peoples to forge new identities. Cimarron, borrowing a Spanish-American term for these fugitive former slaves, is a series of photographic portraits of their descendants.

From Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean islands and Central America, as far as the southern USA, elaborate masquerades are staged that celebrate and keep alive the memory of African slaves and their descendants. Stock characters are portrayed in costume, or in grotesque or satirical representations. A huge variety of African tribal dress, wild ritual regalia and shimmering Mardi Gras outfits feature in breathtaking succession. Vividly coloured silks and cottons combine with woven fibres, leaves, feathers, and body paint; props include emblems of slavery and slave masters – ropes, sticks, guns and machetes. These photographs record real people whose collective sense of memory, folk history and imagination dramatically challenges our expectations.