One of the most memorable and chilling critiques I ever witnessed was with a fellow graduate student showing a new body of work he was embarking on, photographing people living on society's margins in a local transient motel. He was dropping by the motel a couple times a week, focusing his new newly acquired Hassleblad in portrait attempts of the people who were inhabitants of the motel. Influenced by recent exposure to the work of Jim Goldberg, my colleague was trying to make work that was relevant and edgy, but his initial forays felt more like stark reportage and were severely lacking in the quality of empathy. After taking a few moments to review the images on the wall before him, our professor (who had spent the greater part of his career photographing disenfranchised populations) took a breath and said something I'll never forget. "I want you to go back to that motel and make the crudest, most exploitative image of this place and the people in it that you can imagine. Then I want you to take a good hard look at it and never make an image like it again."
I'm reminded of this incident because happily the photographs of Italian contender Carlo Gianferro could very easily descend into the lowest-common denominator of sensationalistic clap-trap photography, but rises above it instead revealing some of the most surprising and dignified images of Roma people that I have ever seen.
Gypsy Girl, from the series Roma/Gypsy Interiors by Carlo Gianferro
Gianferro began his work on photographing Roma communities in 2004, and the images in this body of work are compiled in a book on vernacular architecture entitled Gypsy Architecture. The images were made in Romania and Moldava and depict the inhabitants and homes of successful and wealthy members of Roma (more popularly known as Gypsy) society. Long popularized as either thieving con-men, or romanticized as wild, passionate artists and artisans, these images instead show a slice of Roma culture that describes instead a proud, settled and perhaps landed gentry of Gypsies.
David Nemeth, reviewing Gianferro's images in a review for The Professional Geographer, reports on the subversion of cultural expectations and stereotypes:
Gypsy Architecture provides a vicarious whirlwind tour offering ample evidence that yes, some of the wealthiest Gypsies in Eastern Europe, at a specific time and place of their own choosing, appear to have settled into their own comfort zones, surrounded by their own architectural constructions.
The unusual story presented here, highlighting the splendiferous material rewards of Roma accomplishment in Eastern Europe, will come as a surprise to many non-Gypsies, including some scholars and authors who have built their careers, reputations and political platforms by telling sadder stories.
The Dollar Room, from the series Roma/Gypsy Interiors by Carlo Gianferro
The portraits shown in Gypsy Architecture are colorful, humorous, dignified, and eye-popping. While it may be true that it's easier to make a non-exploitative image of people who are clearly not suffering, I am struck that Gianferro's images of these Roma and their homes manage to be so well-constructed and well seen, and I am delighted by the subversion of even my own expectation of what an image of a Gypsy should look like.
More images from this project and others that Carlo Gianferro has made can be seen on his website.