Josef Koudelka’s “Gypsies” is a cornerstone of 20th-century humanist photography. This 1992 edition continues the legacy of his 1975 breakthrough work, documenting the Roma communities of East Slovakia and Bohemia with a “full-blooded mythologizing rhetoric” that is uniquely his own. Koudelka lived among his subjects for nearly a decade, capturing prototypical rituals and ancient fables within the mundane reality of poverty and clannishness. His stark, high-contrast black-and-white images avoid social commentary in favor of a religious or psychological motive, presenting the Roma as perpetual outsiders in an epic drama of human values.
