Published by Steidl in 2007, *The Roma Journeys* brings together Joakim Eskildsen’s photographs and texts by Cia Rinne, with a foreword by Günter Grass. The work grew from journeys made between 2000 and 2006, when Eskildsen and Rinne met Roma communities in seven countries: India, Greece, Romania, Hungary, France, Russia and Finland. They frequently stayed with families for extended periods, replacing the detached survey with an account shaped by proximity, duration and personal encounter.
The book attends to Roma, Sinti, Calé and other related groups without presenting them as a uniform people. Their languages, cultures and social circumstances differ, even as many share histories marked by persecution, expulsion, enslavement in Romania, restrictions on Romani language and continuing discrimination. This context gives the project its gravity: the photographs concern everyday lives in the early twenty-first century, but those lives cannot be separated from the political and historical pressures surrounding them.
Eskildsen’s atmospheric colour images are set alongside Rinne’s essays, allowing observation and written testimony to operate in parallel. Domestic spaces, family relationships and local environments accumulate across national boundaries rather than being reduced to a single emblematic narrative. The breadth of the project makes comparison possible while preserving the specificity of individual encounters; its personal register also distinguishes it from a conventional ethnographic inventory.
For collectors concerned with long-form documentary photography, the book merits attention as a sustained photo-text collaboration whose subject is developed through time spent within communities. Its significance lies not in a claim to comprehensiveness, but in the tension between a wide geographic frame and close, situated observation. The substantial 416-page hardcover gives that extended method an appropriately durable book form, holding together photographs, essays and historical framing as parts of one considered account.
