Nigel Dickinson - cool photographer

Nigel Dickenson is a cool photographer. I think he is almost as good as me! OMG!

He has some great photos of Roma. If I had to describe the difference between his style and mine it would be that my photos are a little more romantic.

Tags: image, Nigel Dickinson, photographer

Posted in Photography, Roma | No Comments »

Roma Photos

I spent 10 years traveling to 17 countries photographing Roma, or Gypsies. I traveled from their homeland, India, westward to Europe and North America.

The resulting body of work, 64 thousand photos in all, is being edited and eventually will be compiled into a book.

The photos can be found here.

India: Tribal man selling chew

Tags: chew, Gypsies, India, Roma, Tribal man

Posted in Photography, Roma, Society | No Comments »

A Greecian Weeding

9th

Turning south, via a grueling two day bus and train ride, I left the mud and bleakness of Eastern Europe to enter the Mediterranean climate, where even the sun seems happier. Crossing the border at night, I woke to a bright day in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city after Athens. On the outskirts of Thessaloniki is Zendropotamos, an area of low nondescript houses, known by all as the Gypsy quarter. The shops, bars, fast food places, and kiosks are almost exclusively Roma owned. Most dominant of all shops are the wholesale leather coat outlets, their windows boasting the same black low cut coat. Many Roma here do the same thing for a living, namely sell goods on the street for a high markup. Ironically, using their reputation as thieves, they buy cheap imitation goods (watches, clothing) and sell them on the street as the original, making the buyer think they just got a good deal from a Gypsy who wanted to get rid of stolen merchandise quickly. Who the joke is on, I’m not sure. Other Roma do large quantity transport of bulk goods. A common sight in the neighborhood are huge lorries, decked out inside for long distance travel with the family, used to cargo potatoes, tangerines, scrap metal, whatever, from one place to another. This in mainly in Greece, but not exclusively. The eastern block countries are starved for some goods, while plentiful in others such as whiskey, vodka, cigarettes, some arms, or even drugs.

Even though the houses are modest, the cars are inordinately fancy, BMW’s and Mercedes a common site in the street. Once again the paradox of the Roma (in my Gadge eyes) can be seen: scruffy barefoot children playing on the porch of a small concrete house, whilst the newest luxury car sits beaming in the driveway. But on the whole this is a wealthy neighbourhood, and people are much better dressed than I am.

The day I arrived was the beginning of another Roma wedding. It can often appear that life savings are spent on Roma weddings, and this one seemed to be no exception. Two pavilions were set up, each at one end of the neighborhood, about a kilometer apart. Inside were rows of tables and chairs, enough to seat several hundred, and at the end a stage for the musicians. One pavilion was for the bride’s family, the other the groom’s. The two families were different, I was informed, the groom’s being Roma, the bride’s being Tsingene. What this meant, I was soon to learn.

As night fell, the music began to play, guitar, clarinet, electric synthesizer, violin and drums, all amplified to ear breaking heights through large speakers at all ends of the pavilion. People began to gather, many people. The whole village came, the family members seated and the less connected standing at the entrance. Then the food and alcohol came, lots of it. As soon as a plate was finished, as soon as a bottle was emptied, another was brought, on and on, an army of servers running back and forth loaded with food and drink. Children, ever present, ran around, rolled, danced, cried, screamed and played, weaving through the still relatively calm grownups. This would change as the evening progressed, showing that the grownups were only preserving their strength for what was to come.

As the alcohol began to flow in the revelers’ veins, pushing the blood to their faces, families rose to dance, and this is when the difference between the two clans began to show. The groom’s tent held an air of formality, a feeling that, although people were drunk, very drunk, and stoned, there was control, that chaos still lived somewhere else than in this tent. One at a time, families rose to take the dance floor for a few songs as the rest of the family watched. The women pulsated their hips, and the men rose their arms, circling them. Men stood and threw handfuls of money onto the dance floor, the bills fluttering to the ground to be danced on. Eventually, whenever the risk of getting trampled lessened, scuttering children picked up the money, placing it into a basket on the stage as payment for the band. After a few songs, one family sat back down and another rose to dance and be seen by the rest of the group. For many hours this went on, late into the night, like drunken clockwork. There was a sense of order to them.

Not so for the bride’s tent of Tsingene on the other side of the village. They started much the same way as the groom’s family, each family taking their turn as the rest watched, but soon madness grabbed their souls, wrenching them from the mundane, orderly life and throwing them into a passionate revelry where the music, alcohol and passion of what was happening overtook them all. Their loved child, for after all she was only fourteen, was soon to enter womanhood, and with it, would leave them to live with the groom’s family. This consumed them with joy and sadness, tears flowing as abundantly as laughter. Children danced on tables, adults danced everywhere, hugging each other, some out of happiness, some because they needed a shoulder to cry on, and all caught in a craze that undulated the tent walls. Men fought, punched each other, punched themselves, all out of the madness that needs no reason. The older brother, affected more than most, at one point began lashing out at whoever he could, and had to be held down until his rage subsided into hopeless sobs. The mother wandered around beyond belief that her newly born child was already leaving her to live with a man and make a family of her own. Only a few years ago her daughter was an infant, only recently did she get her period, and now she’s leaving. “Why?” the mother would ask family members as she wandered the tent. But nobody could answer. This is just what happens. The bride, sitting near the dance floor on a throne for all to see, decked in a white dress that dwarfed her small frame, laden with pounds of gold, sat dazed, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing. People fed her beer, putting the bottle to her mouth and tipping it upwards like a milk bottle. On and on the music glared, people screamed, beer bottles broke, and more children cried as their bedtimes passed and the parents danced on into the night.

This went on for two days, then at the end of the second night, in less than two minutes, they were gone. The whole family, bride and all, without warning disappeared into the night with a clash of crying babies, honking horns and screeching tires. One minute they packed the pavilion with madness, the next, they left it, a desolate wasteland. Overturned tables, hundreds of broken beer bottles and half eaten plates of food, scattered chairs, all lying in stark solitary silence, silence that chilled the spine in contrast to what pounded the ears just moments before. What happened? They had decided it was time to go. To somewhere else, only they knew where. Perhaps to bed. In the craziness, nobody had bothered to tell me, the very nice but dumb gadge.

The next day I met the bride on the street. She invited me to her new home with much pride. Her family was sitting on the floor counting money. They counted out large wads of big bills and handed them to the young bride to keep in a pouch around her waist: dowry money that the newlyweds would use to set up house.

Tags: greece, Roma, wedding

Posted in Blog, Roma | No Comments »

Lower and Upper Roma

2nd Jan

The Kasimpasa area in Istambul, Turkey, is famous for producing musicians. Situated on a hill with narrow streets zigzagging at steep angles, the neighbourhood could be in an Escher painting. Clothes lines are strong across the alleys from street level to rooftop high above, creating a mesh of spider webs. Everyone here is a musician, all the men, that is. Stop one in the street, at a coffee shop, or in the barber shop to ask him what he does for a living, and he’ll tell you he’s a violinist, flutist, guitarist, or drummer. The occasional exception is a barber. After all, these men all have mustaches that need constant trimming.

The children grow up around music, getting spontaneous lessons at the breakfast table, or on the way to the coffee shop, or sitting beside their father during a break in a performance. For most children in Kasimpasa, their father has left home every evening for as long as they can remember to play at some event or other, or, more commonly, at a restaurant.

On the day of my visit, however, there is no music drifting down from the rooftops, nor are any instruments to be seen in the ever crowded coffee shops, because this day, like yesterday, tomorrow and for many days to come, is Ramadan, and the enjoyment of music is forbidden. Music for work, however, is allowed, and there are enough tourists and non-muslims to keep the musicians employed. So for about an hour in the late afternoon the corners are crowded with well dressed musicians, instruments in tow, waiting to be picked up to go to work. Mostly taken to the restaurants, they will serenade the night away, entertaining diners with traditional Turkish music.

Towards nightfall, for those who have not gone off to work, there is a restlessness that falls upon Kasimpasa. People sit impatiently, pace doorways, smoke, and check their watches. They are waiting for something. Meanwhile the women prepare food, running to the stores for last-minute provisions and working in the kitchens, cooking. Finally the time comes and the minarets issue the call, firecrackers go off, and people bolt with joy into the streets. The mosques have declared the day over and all Muslims can finally break their fast that has lasted since dawn. Within seconds the eating houses are full and every person, from store owner to shoe shiner to street urchins is hurriedly pushing food into his mouths. Just minutes later, a town that was poised and tense now becomes relaxed and languid, finally able to sit back and feel normal again. Yet another day of respect paid to Allah has gone by.

4th Jan

About five hours west of Istambul by bus is the town Edirne. Sitting on Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria, it is the main check point for all border crossings. Because of its strategic position, it houses a heavy contingent of military personel, and the streets are full of young wandering soldiers. Late afternoon when I arrive, it is cold and damp, immersed in a thick fog, cut off from the rest of the world, as if in an underground no-man’s land. Hidden up on the hill out of the way of everything, where the fog is thickest, lives one of Turkey’s largest Rom communities, Kiyik Merkez. Considered a dangerous part of town by the locals, I go staight for it and am quickly taken under wing by Onur, a young man whom I met in the street. Of Kurd and Rom parents, he hovered over me during my whole time like a guardian angel. Used to being in Roma communities, I did not feel I needed his protection, but, taken in by his good heart, I welcomed his friendship. We walked the streets made muddy by the fog and lined by low houses, almost huts, tilled and made out of cement. As is the custom, I was offered tea everywhere I went, until my my stomach ached and my tongue was thick with tannin.

Having just left his aunt’s house, whom he insisted I visit to photograph her children, we were turning the corner at the end of the street when a music that seeped out of the thick fog greeted our ears. Dense drumbeats undulated with the reedy tunes of a clarinet, fading, then coming back strong as the fog passed through the streets. The sound was unmistakable. It was a wedding.

With Onur close beside me, we picked up our pace, weaving through the streets like Pied piper’s children, following the elusive, yet ever louder music. Eventually, at the end of a wide street, more muddy field than tarmac, we found fifty Roma solemly dancing to the music of a small band. Despite the auspicious occasion everybody was dressed in daily clothing, the mud creeping up their legs. But the bride had somehoew remained mud-free and stood out like a ghostly aparition in the enshrouding mist. Engulfed in a voluptuous white wedding dress, she danced gingerly in the center of the crowd. They cirlcled her like peasants around a fairy princess, watching her every move, as if their gaze was the only thing keeping her from floating away into the fog. Someone braught out a chair and she was made to stand on it, further blurring the distinction between where she ended and the sky began. As if to weigh her down they pined notes of money onto the whispy dress, like a doll being dressed in awkward clothing. This was to happen once in her life, marking the final stage from girl to womanhood, and the mood was happy yet sad. Her father went up to her to pin money on her dress, tears in his eyes, and her composure, so well kept untill then, also broke, her own tears flowing freely down her face. She cried joyfully, a face full of love and respect for the family around her.

The ceremony over, she was led by both fathers to a decorated taxi, where the women waited to take her to her and her husband to their new home. There the two would sleep together for the first time and, by virtue of a bloody handkerchief, show to both families that she is a virgin.

Having been here since before anybody can remember, the Roma still stand out from the locals down the hill. One non-gypsy told me that “even if a person doesn’t look Roma, one can always tell if they are just by hearing their accent.” Their jobs are also distinct from other Turks, he says. Apart from general manual labor, their jobs are music, transporting goods in horse drawn carriages, shoe shining, and selling things on the street (flowers, postcards, vegetables, fruit). My friend Onur’s mother works for $150/month in a clothing factory, giving them a middle-class lifestyle. He studies medicine in university for half the day, and for the rest, apprentices in a metal working forge, another classical Roma occupation. When I asked him where his father was, he said he was in the army but would not say more. Onur became quiet after that, sadness coming over his face.

5th Jan

I was still in the same Kiyik Merkez that I arrived in yesterday afternoon, but in the morning it was a different world, for the sun had come out and the air was crispy clear. The colors, yesterday muted and pastel, now stood out bright, bobbing along in a little child’s cap, or sitting stoically on an old man’s sweater. The brick red roofs made a patchwork puzzle on the now fully visible hill. Onur was in school, so I set out alone. Entering a small street, I began winding up the hill, and within minutes a pesky, crowd of curious children had swarmed around me. Clattering away in Turkish, they conversed with me at length, although the actual amount of information exchanged remained infinitely small. My Turkish vocabulary can be counted on two hands, and the author of the dictionary I carried had decided to exclude two thirds of the Turkish language. So I spoke to the children in Spanish or French or German or Inglish, depending on my mood. Sometimes we would agree, other times we would find ourselves in desagreement, but rarely would we understand each other. That didn’t matter much.

Upon reaching the top I now had a good view of the area, and what I had not seen the night before was that Kiyik actually extended over the hill and sprawled down the other side, eventually spattering out into empty fields. Kept unawares of this extension by my guardian, Onur, who lived on the top of the hill, he had deemed it too dangerous for me. I now learnt from the gaggle of children around me that Kiyik had two types of Roma, those who lived on the town side of the hill, spreading all the way to the top, and those who lived on the back side of the hill, spreading down to the fields. Like Onur, my young friends lived on the top of the hill, and they now warned me at length not to go down the other side. The Roma on the top were OK for me, the children said, because they were “honest and civilized”, but those down there, they were no good. Poorer and “less civilized”, the lower hill Roma were to be avoided. The children made gestures with their hands as if stealing.

I agreed with my companions that those on the top of the hill were OK. Even my gaggle of companions were OK. They were a royal pain because they wanted to be in every photograph I took, effectively ruining most of my shots, but they were still as “civilized” as seven year olds could possibly be. Yet what they were saying about the other Roma didn’t sound altogether true. There seemed to be a heirarchy going on where those on the top of the hill and on the town side deemed themselves better than those over the hill. I decided to go and see for myself, alone. After several attempts to disperse my group politely, I eventually did so with angry screams, and made my way down the hill.

What I found, as I crested the hill and walked down the back side of it, was abject poverty, clinging to everything like a crippling blanket. The dogs were half eaten away, one or two horses wobbled pathetically around, and rotten putrid garbage filled every corner. As I walked along the street, people looked at me as if they had never seen a white man, open mouthed, grubby faces staring blankly. I had not showered for several days, and my clothes were a week old, but my hygiene was a perfume commercial compared to the people around me. Their tattered clothes were filthy, wiped in the grime that covered the ground, and their bodies carried black dirt short of a coal miner’s body.

It was very difficult to see people in this condition and treat them as human, first because they looked so far from it, and, second, because the toll on my heart was tremendous. My first reaction was to objectify them, render them as something other than myself, because then the guilt, responsibility, and rage inside me seemed less disruptive. Things are simpler if I separate myself. I can say “Poor creatures, isn’t it terrible” and then continue with my life, keeping the barrier between them and my heart intact, avoiding any chance of internal conflict, and, more tragically, avoiding compassion.

But the pain I felt overwhelmed me, biting at my heart. I found it very difficult to photograph. Not because there wasn’t anything to photograph, because even in filth and misery there is reason to take pictures, but because of the shame it caused them to be photographed. Hidden on the other side of the hill, like a dirty secret to the town, they seemd helpless to alter their state. When seeing me they could not change into clean clothes, nor sweep away the rot, but had to run into their hovels or sit there feeling like pigs on display at the local market. Their reluctance to be photographed was not the shyness of naive natives, but the shame of people acutely aware that they are disgusting and filthy in the eyes of people who look like me. I ended up feeling just as shameful as they did, like I had walked into their house without asking and caught them in the toilet. Maybe this is why nobody wanted me to come here. Not because these Roma were dangerous, but because nobody wanted me to photograph Roma in such dehumanizing squalor. I took one photograph so that I would not forget, but more I could not take. Next day I would be gone as quickly as I came.

6th Jan

Leaving Edirne and Turkey, I left color behind and went to Dimitrovgrad, a drab gray town in Bulgaria that even in sunshine has no color. The peoples’ clothes, the buildings, the cars, even the peoples’ faces, it is all gray, washed out, and dilapidated. The whole place needs a makeover. The cars need tune-ups, buildings need paint jobs, and the inhabitants need a holiday. The Roma, invariably at the bottom of the food chain since their arrival over 500 years ago, were no exception. Situated about four kilometers out of town in a place called Mlara Guardia, they had created their own little village.

In fact there were two villages, those on the top of the hill and those bellow in the valley, their relationship much like those in Edirne. The Roma on the top of the hill lived in government built apartment blocks, with roads, a post office, and a school. They were more integrated into Bulgarian society, and many labeled themselves Bulgarian before calling themselves Roma. Of their comrades in the fields below, the Roma on the hill warned me laboriously about not going there. I would surely be mugged, they said. Their lower neighbors were poor, very poor, and the sight of somebody as rich as myself would bring out the worst in them. Do Not Go Down There, they told me, and in fact they prevented me by force from doing so. Eventually they allowed me to go to the border, but made sure they accompanied me, all thirty of them.

In the adjacent field, the Roma from the lower village had disassembled an old factory and used the bricks to build small houses, creating a rambling little village with mud streets. This informal “borrowing” from the factory was a point of contention for the Taxi driver who drove me there, but, like all the Bulgarian Gaje I spoke to, he was very subdued about his complaints. I don’t know if this trait is still remnants from the communist era when any complaining was dangerous to your health, often causing the grumbler to die of pneumonia in a labor camp, or whether it is more a distrust of something foreign, and not really a genuine dislike. I suspected it was a genuine dislike. There is an undercurrent in the Bulgarians when they speak about the Roma that I can’t quite place, as if they are keeping something hidden. What I’m sensing could be just part of the big picture, namely that the Bulgarians need a holiday from their drab lives, and anything vaguely irritating right now causes a stir in them that they must suppress, because if they didn’t they’d very possibly break out in a rage.

The vehement warnings that the Roma themselves gave me about this lower village was not expressed by any of the Bulgarians in town, who readily gave me directions, more perplexed that I would want to go there than worried for my safety. Why I would want to photograph such “misery and backwardness” was beyond them. This leads me to suspect that the Roma, like their Turkish counterparts, were anxious to keep me away from the lower village out of shame rather than any fear for my safety. Many of these Roma have been forcefully settled, their culture and identity stripped by the communist officials in an attempt to integrate them into Bulgarian society. Before this, the majority of Roma may have been poor, like most Bulgarians, but at least they had a sense of personal identity and culture. Now they are just plain poor. It reminded me of how the American Indians were stripped of their culture in an attempt to make them function “productively” in the white man’s world. The Roma from the top of the hill had managed more or less managed to conform, and there was a measure of pride in doing so, but the “wilder” Roma had not, and this was shameful. It braught up images of African Americans making their hair straight like a white person’s hair because they find it more attractive than their own curly hair. Racism is most effective when reinforced by the victims themselves.

Why did I want to go to the lower village when everyone so clearly did not want me to, I wondered. I wanted to confront my own racism. Like in Turkey, I wanted to see if I could penetrate through the grime and otherness to where I was percieving human beings like myself. But in this case, I never got the chance to try out my self imposed spychology. The risks, the upper hill residents said, were just too great.

But, what if I was robbed? They feared this greatly because it would prove what many Gadje believe already: that all Gypsies are thieves. Wherever I go, be it Spain, Hungary or Turkey, the Roma I visit are very eager to keep my stuff safe, because they are painfully aware of their reputation, and see me as a conduit to show the world that they are not dishonest. At least not all of them, since they admit that some Roma are foreced to steal out of need. But not all, and this is the key.

Tags: Roma, turkey

Posted in Blog, Roma | No Comments »