Koudelka - Gypsies

I always feel guilty about my photo-book problem. They are ridiculously expensive and I can only rarely indulge in buying one. Koudelka’s Gypsies is one of those books that I have wanted for over 20 years - all the way back when I stumbled across it in Calgary library during my J-school days. And it arrived in my mailbox today.

Here are three stories with a lot of the photographs from the book. The first one focuses on the collaboration between Koudelka and sociologist Will Guy, who wrote the text accompanying the photographs. The second one is a good introduction to Koudelka and this particular work, and the third one is a short story in Aperture as an introduction to the third edition of the book.

And everything in those stories is true and those photographs are an important social document and they still resonate especially at this time when discrimination against Roma across Eastern and Central Europe is on the rise. But the reason I love this book is that this, more than any other photo-book I have ever seen, is really a book of poetry. You need to understand that this is a beautiful object. The pages are thick, heavy, soft to the touch. This is in contrast to the actual photographs: grainy, gritty, rough – that may be the result of available equipment and film emulsion as much as the photographer’s choice – and then that contrasts again with the high emotional charge in each photograph. It really is a masterful, poetic work. And what is particularly interesting is that each photograph stands on its own and they don’t necessarily connect into a larger narrative, but they form a very concise, coherent whole.