In the first year of A Year In The Country I posted about Axel Hoedt’s Once A Year book, which featured folkloric costumes from the Fasnacht carnival in southwestern Germany.
Back then I said of his photographs:
“There’s a sense of being in amongst the denizens of a land far from the twee fields of folklore with this particular slice of carnivalesque dressing up… The creatures his photographs capture… seem like the darker urban cousins of Charles Frégers Wilder Mann, which in themselves are not all cuddly and light… but Axel Hoedt’s once a year capturees are voyagers from further flung outlands and less well-lit crevices of imagination.”
In his next book Dusk he seems to wander amongst further more shadowed corners of folkloric rituals, again from southwestern Germany but also venturing to Austria and Switzerland.
The images in Dusk seem to blend documentary portraits of those in folkloric costume, fine art and contemporary fashion explorations and related imagery.
They conjure a particularly unsettling atmosphere, not one of carnivalesque revelries but rather one which seems to possibly unearth the far reaching, less civilised tales and times from which these carnivals and folkloric rituals may have once sprung.
Along which lines, the information on the book at his publishers Steidl Books states the following:
“Hoedt reminds us of what carnival once used to be: a final celebration before the dawning of hard times.”
Brrr.
(File post under: Other Pathway Pointers And Markers)
Directions and Destinations:
Dusk at Steidl Books
Local Places Of Interest:
Day #272/365: Axel Hoedt’s folkloric club kid rogues gallery and symbolic expulsions…
Day #69/365: Charles Frégers Wilder Mann and rituals away from the shores of albion
Ether Signposts #32/52a: Charles Frégers Yokainoshima – Island Of Monsters
