The term cimarrón (Maroon) was used in Spanish America to designate enslaved Africans who had escaped from captivity: fugitives who led free lives in remote corners of the continent and who managed to establish their own communities or to forge new identities by mixing with the indigenous peoples.
Cimarrón contains a series of photographic portraits of the descendants of these enslaved Africans. Brightly-colored silks and cottons are combined with woven fabrics, leaves, feathers, and body paint. Accessories include the emblems of slavery and slaveholders: ropes, sticks, pistols, and machetes. The photographs are accompanied by texts by specialists in the field that provide the necessary historical and ethnographic context. The images depict real people, whose collective memories, folk histories, and imaginaries pose a sharp challenge to our expectations.
Charles Fréger is an acclaimed photographer whose work has marked out a new domain within the genre of documentary photography.
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