Gypsies by Patrick Cariou retraces in reverse the migration of the Rom people (the Gypsies' own term for themselves) from Western to Eastern Europe, through the Middle East, and ultimately to India, the home of their ancestors. The original journey was an epic, thousand-year odyssey and Cariou labored more than a decade to travel it.
Cariou comes to the end of his travels spent documenting a sparse landscape of itinerant clans living in a world apart for hundreds of years, from citizen to gangster, from the flashy prosperity of the Mercedes-driving Manouches of France to the abject poverty of the Roma of Slovakia.
The result is a stunning and thought-provoking collection of portraits and landscapes that demonstrate the wide variety of conditions in which the Gypsies of the world find themselves. These people, scattered far and wide, are a family, bound together by centuries of history and generations of survival.
