Background information
"This photo book classic, 'Roma' by Magnum photographer Joseph KOUDELKA, is a revised and enlarged version of the original maquette for his 'Cikáni' (Czech for Gypsies) prepared by Joseph KOUDELKA and graphic designer Milan KOPRIVA in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. Joseph KOUDELKA left Czechoslovakia in 1970 after extensively documenting the Russian invasion of Prague in August 1968. The book was never published in that original form.
Content
This extended version of the photo volume 'Roma' by Joseph KOUDELKA consists of 109 photographs taken between 1962 and 1971 in what was, at the time, Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. The word Gypsies (the common name for this group when the photographs were taken between 1962 and 1971, before the current term Roma was established) is used as the book title." © Steidl Verlag , 2011)
Book reviews
"Joseph KOUDEKA's photographs aim at a visual distillation of a pattern of human values: a pattern that involves theater, large gesture, brave style, precious camarderie and bitter loneliness. The pattern and texture of his pictures form the silent equivalent of an epic drama. Koudelka\'s pictures seem to concern themselves with prototypical rituals, and a theater of ancient and unchangeable fables. Their motive is perhaps not psychological but religious. Perhaps they describe not the small and cherished differences that distinguish each of us from all others, but the prevailing circumstance that encloses us." (© John Szarkowski)"Rarely has a body of work been so deserving of two completely different editions." (© Time)
"These stark images by Joseph KOUDELKA depict the poverty and clannishness of Gypsy life, but unlike many documentary photographers, he does not present their situation as a social problem that can somehow be fixed. Instead, he shows the Gypsies as perpetual outsiders, and their life as a primal mix of glee and wonder, sorrow and mystery." (© The New York Times)
"Gives a palpable sense of a people apart, unto themselves, dislocated from contemporary society and even time." (© Huffington Post)
"Joseph KOUDELKA brings to life the even older world of the Roma gypsies that he encountered in his travels in the late 1960s and early 1970s in images that resonate with mystery and ritual, romance and hardship." (© The Guardian)
About the Czech Magnum photographer, Joseph KOUDELKA (b. 1938)
Photo books by, with his participation and on the work of Joseph KOUDELKA
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Will Guy
- Format
- German re-edit, Gebundene Ausgabe mit Schutzumschlag, 25 x 32,5 x 3 cm., 109 S/W-Abb., deutsch-sprachiger Text - GERMAN TEXT ONLY!