Cimarron: Freedom and Masquerade

This series of extraordinary photographic portraits by Charles Fréger brings to life the vivid costumes used in festivals by the descendants of African slaves in America.

All across the Americas, from the sixteenth century onwards, enslaved Africans escaped their captors and struck out on their own. These runaways established their own communities or joined with indigenous peoples to forge new identities. Cimarrón, borrowing a Spanish-American term for these fugitive former slaves, is a new ...