To be beuatiful gipsy


  • Photographer
    Tamas Schild
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    freelance
  • Date of Photograph
    2009
  • Technical Info
    Nikon D200 raw, as shot

These photographs do not wish to capture the "decisive moment" (C. Bresson). No big dicisions or change take place on them or in the environment they were taken. It is rather the unchangeable that triggered them. The photographs were taken in Trasdanubia, Hungary, Among members of the gipsy community. There are various kinds of drama of course. These ones capture the ones the most beautiful ones I know among them go through.

Story

TO BE BEAUTIFUL GIPSY.
What can it be like? From cradle to grave, among us, in Eastern Europe. Not a political statement, just food for thought.

Background:
One tenth of the at least six million strong European gipsy
population lives in Hungary. Unemployment and crime rate are above average among them. The number of racial attacks against them is on the rise.
There is a lot more to be said about them and the photographs, but would run out of the space available here.

1) Speechless beauty - (autistic girl from my home town- Hungary)
2) Mirror, Mirror am I beautiful? – in preparation for her first ever portrait
3) Diamonds in the rough –
4) Candle-lit convict’s head – We used to play together as kids. Later he robbed our house. He is said to have cut off his wife’s fingers for not going with him to steal. She accused him of abusing their daughter and was imprisoned on several other counts. After Tibi was released, his wife disappeared. He lives with his daughter now, a mother of two… She would not complain, has learned the lessons. Tibi makes a living as he can, is as good looking as ever, continuing to command his psychopathic charm. The photo was taken in their home without electricity.
5) Roma Antigone- the closest relative to Tibi’s „wife” now, the only person regularly visiting them.


"...Do you know the drifting of the years
the years over the crumpled fields?
Do you understand the wrinkle
of transience? Do you comprehend
my care-gnarled hands? Do you know
the name of orphanage? Do you know
what pain treads the unlifting darkness
with cleft hooves, with webbed feet?
The night, the cold, the pit. Do you know
the convict's head twisted askew?
Do you know the caked troughs, the tortures
of the abyss?
..."
Apocrypha by Janos Pilinszky
translation by Ted Hughes

(unassigned, unpublished project. Further graphic details here:
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/embertom/sets/72157623004683239/
and here
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/embertom/sets/72157604091994054/

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