Painted Elephants

Charles Fréger is a French photographer, born in 1975, who studied at the Rouen Art School. He is most well known for his Wilder Mann series - that captures the strange and surreal costumes worn by tribal communities in Europe to celebrate the mythology of the wild man. The project was later turned into a book.

His most recent series, commissioned by National Geographic, documents the brightly coloured and patterned painted elephants in Jaipur, North-West India.

“It was like a dream to organise this painted elephant project in India. I wanted to know how it feel to portrait the elephant, so much that the elephant became really the model, much more than the mahout on its back. I finally managed to photograph 25 elephants, one by one, with different costumes and painting.”