Aam Aastha: Indian Devotions
By Charles Fréger
Published by Thames & Hudson
London, 2023

In festivals across India, ordinary citizens dress as gods, acting out traditional stories to entertain audiences while building powerful communal and religious experiences. It is these phenomena that French photographer Charles Fréger explores in his latest monograph, Aam Aastha, dedicating 288 photographs and explanatory texts to the myriad idiosyncrasies in India’s regional folkloric and religious life.

Fréger employs his trademark, colorful style to capture costumes of comedic characters, animals, and masked figures, an approach developed through his career-long fascination with garments. Through Fréger’s balanced lens, the individual performers are removed from the divine and fixed context of the stage and photographed before mountains and streets, thereby directing our focus to the person behind the costume. Direct gazes and idiosyncratic poses form another sort of performance developed in collaboration with Fréger. Meanwhile, space is left for their individuality and the interpretation of their roles. Whether confident, stoic, or shy, each performer receives an unclouded, direct portrait—far from what Indian novelist Anuradha Roy describes as contrived “photo-features . . . carefully arranged to appear untouched by modernity” in the book’s introduction.