About Book

My ten years of work, ranging over 17 countries, and encompassing about 64,000 images has always been planned as a book. The book as yet, though, still remains unmade. Photo books, unless they are of famous people, pets, or about sex, do not often make money. They are a work of love. This means that it is hard to find a publisher willing to make the commitment of publishing something that at best will cover expenses. But it is done all the time, and so I am confident that the book will come into form in it’s own time. For now, below you can read the four page introduction to the book.

The Book Intro

    “You dirty gypsy,” the man said as he sidestepped me.

Looking up from where I was sitting, I wondered what he had meant. I didn’t know what a gypsy was, but from the tone of the man’s voice, I knew it wasn’t a good thing. I looked at myself. My hair was shoulder length, perhaps a bit disheveled, and my clothes showed traces of an ice cream. I was barefoot because it was hot and my mother had let me go to the park without shoes. Before the stranger had interrupted me, I was playing with an empty Coke can beside the pond.

After inspecting myself to try and find what he had deemed so repugnant, I decided I looked fine (for a four year old) and resumed my playing. But I never forgot his look. I later learned to recognize that look, because, although I was not a Gypsy, I was the son of hippie parents, and therefore also undesirable to people like him.

For this reason, photographing Gypsies, or Roma, as they call themselves, is personal. Like most Roma, I grew up in a large, extended family that had a very strong sense of “us vs. them.” In the Roma family groups that have kept their customs, to be a Roma is to be part of a tight social structure with rules and practices that are quite distinct from mainstream western culture.

These frameworks regulate all parts of Roma life, from eating, to marriage to how one can interact with outsiders. Although my family had no specific racial heritage, unlike the Roma, who can trace their roots back to India around the 10th Century, we too had our own set of values that set us apart, often negatively, from the mainstream. In my community, “us” was a social network of hippies scattered across the globe, and “them” was the “straight” people, our derogatory term for anybody who did such things as work nine-to-five, trust the government.

Hippie values and customs are nothing like the Roma’s, and hippies do not suffer racism, yet my experience in the park taught me early that I was different and unwanted by “straight” people, just like many Roma are unwanted by their non-Roma neighbors, called Gadge. Quickly after I learned that straight people did not like me, I learned to not like them.

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