Since 2009, Åke Ericson has been photographing Roma communities across Europe, and Non Grata gathers the work of that sustained attention into a single volume. The Swedish photographer moves through France, Serbia, Kosovo, Romania, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Spain and Switzerland, recording the texture of daily life among people whose presence is so often treated as a problem to be managed. The book’s title is Latin for “undesirable” or “not welcome,” a phrase that names the discrimination many Roma encounter because of a surname or the colour of their skin. Published by GOST Books in 2018, the collection runs to 140 pages in a clothbound hardback and carries the full weight of a long-term project rather than a single reporting trip.
What distinguishes Non Grata is its refusal of the spectacular. Ericson photographs interiors, streets, waiting, work, family, transit — the ordinary matter of living — and in doing so builds an intimate portrait of a minority that is frequently discussed and rarely seen on its own terms. The sequence across ten countries gives the book a geographic breadth, but its coherence comes from the consistency of the photographer’s eye. The images themselves carry much of the argument.
The subject is unmistakably political, yet the book is not an illustrated thesis. Ericson’s method is documentary in the older sense: patient, proximate, attentive to ordinary life under difficult conditions. Readers interested in European photojournalism and in the ethics of representing marginalised communities will find a considered example here, one that treats its subjects as people rather than as evidence.
For collectors, Non Grata represents a body of work developed over nearly a decade and issued by GOST Books. The clothbound format and the scale of the undertaking make it a substantial addition to a shelf of European documentary practice. It belongs alongside other long-form projects that ask what photography can do when it stays in one place long enough — and across borders — to see clearly.
