Books worth reading #1: 'Wilder Mann' by Charles Fréger

Around this time of year, about five or six years ago, I was researching some material for a QI Christmas episode (back in the days when I was one of the 'elves' - the people who research and write the award-winning TV show). 

It was always strange recording a Christmas show in May or June when temperatures outside were sometimes in the high twenties and we were in the studio surrounded by fake snow, people in awful jumpers (other than Giles Brandreth), snowmen and Christmas trees covered in baubles. But that's how TV works - you always have to work months ahead. 

What I was researching was the legend of Krampus, Europe and Scandinavia's fearsome anti-Santa that only reads the Naughty List and actually takes presents away from misbehaving kids and punishes them. 

Here's a traditional representation of him from the early 1900s:

People still dress up as Krampus to this day and it was while I was trawling through a pile of images that I came across Charles Fréger's fantastic book Wilder Mann. 

Fréger is a French photographer who travels all over the world taking photographs of people in ethnic costumes designed for festivals and pageants. Some of them are bizarre in the extreme.

The only copy I get get my hands on at the time was the German translation but, as it's a photo book it didn't matter too much. However, an English version is now available and I'm now able to read the intro by novelist Robert McLiam Wilson in which he says:

'Plugged in, neurotically Wi-Fied and 3Ged as we are, we yearn to re-establish contact with the actual, the primal, the old … We languish for the non-mechanical and the pre- or post-industrial. We are pilgrims seeking the past, the genuine, the individual.' 

'Of course, you can wade through a million websites about Paris Hilton,' he continues. 'But you can also find an almost equal number of places discussing, analysing or promoting extraordinarily old-fashioned or backwards-leaning pursuits: pilgrimage, Druidism, shamanism, nomadism, transhumance, land-living … Everywhere there are strands and networks of revivalisms and reviewings. Ancient skills and lores, dilettante survivalism and how-to historicism …"

That struck a chord with me as, in my native Cornwall, we celebrate with similar gusto. Obvious examples are the dragon during the Hal-an-Tow on Helston's Flora Day, Golowan's Penglaz, Padstow's Obby Oss Festival and the giant puppet of Bolster the Giant who comes out to play in St Agnes on May Day Bank Holiday.

I think the reason that Fréger's book resonated with me was remembrance of these childhood folk festivals and pageants. Plus, this is folk art - art produced by everyday people - that is celebrated and almost venerated. And the figures and costumes are often made from natural or recycled materials. This goes to the very heart of my personal philosophy of art - that it is for everyone and can be made by everyone using any kind of materials. 

The big take-away from this for me is that this form of art - these costumes and puppets - mean more to the average person than whatever Charles Saatchi chooses to display in his gallery. The Wilder Menn will still be around long after we've stopped talking about most contemporary artists. 

And that, I think, is a very good thing. 

Charles Fréger's website is here (and his other books are also fantastic).