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By Patrick Cariou
Foreword by Eddie Brannan
Hardcover
192 pages
11.5 x 9.4 in
117 full-color photographs
ISBN: 978-1-57687-570-4
Photography / Portraits
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With Gypsies, photographer Patrick Cariou retraces in reverse the migration of the Rom people (the Gypsies’ own term for themselves) from Western to Eastern Europe, through the Middle East, and ultimately to India, the home of their ancestors. The original journey was an
epic, thousand-year odyssey and Cariou labored more than a decade to travel it.
Cariou, a self taught anthropologist and a professional and award-winning documentary, portrait, and fine art photographer harbors a lifelong, passionate fascination with outlaws and renegades and an equal ability to earn their trust and respect. In 1997, Cariou’s first monograph, Surfers featured the thousand-yard stares of renowned and revered athletes who had famously chosen the sea over land, movement over stasis; in 2000 he produced
Yes Rasta, after vanishing into the Jamaican forests in pursuit of the last members of the true and hidden cult of Rastafarianism; and now, in 2011, with Gypsies, Cariou comes to the end of his travels spent documenting a sparse landscape of itinerant clans living in a world apart for
hundreds of years.
The result is a stunning and thought-provoking collection of portraits and landscapes that demonstrate the wide variety of conditions in which the Gypsies of the world find themselves, from citizen to gangster, from the flashy
prosperity of the Mercedes-driving Manouches of France to the abject poverty of the Roma of Slovakia. Incredibly, Cariou’s images reveal the diversity of ethnic types to be found in this global tribe; from the dark-eyed, ringlet haired
stereotypical “Gypsy types” in northern Europe, who seem to display clearly their Indian heritage, to blond, blue-eyed children in Afghanistan, much nearer to the source of origin, who nonetheless have distinctly Caucasian features.
These people, scattered far and wide, are a family, bound together by centuries of history and generations of survival.
Patrick Cariou is an acclaimed photographer whose work synthesizes documentary and fine art image making. His photography has been collected in three monographs, Surfers (powerHouse Books, 1997), Yes Rasta (powerHouse Books, 2000), and Trenchtown Love (779, Editions, 2003).
