It is 2018. I have been working in the Politics of Photography section of the RomArchive for two years as a white person. During this period, my colleagues and I asked many questions and had many discussions. Who takes photographs? Who photographs whom, and when? Who is photographed? How are they photographed? Who is exoticized or stigmatized by photography? What images dominate the media and our habits of seeing? Who gets complex representation, and who is ignored or represented one-sidedly or wrongly.

“No shot you take is innocent.”

For more complex and realistic images of the multifaceted reality of the lives of Sinti and Roma, we must question racist, discriminatory and exoticizing habits of seeing. Vicente Rodríguez Fernández, co-director of the Legacies of Empires program at the University of Washington says, referencing Jean-Luc Godard: “No shot you take is innocent.” All photos are taken in a social context. In the case of Sinti and Roma, this is a context of centuries-long marginalization, stigmatization, discrimination, exoticization and persecution.

We need to (want to) understand this context from other perspectives, which can be a painful process. This can mean unlearning putative knowledge, changing deep-seated positions and opinions and constantly grappling with violent mechanisms. In an interview¹ Rodríguez Fernández explains how this process of unlearning and re-learning² can work:

In the course of our work, we asked ourselves what images of Sinti and Roma are missing from the public sphere, and set out to look for them. There is a lack of everyday pictures, family pictures, pictures of friends spending time together. There is a lack of images of workers, artists, academics. There is a lack of pictures which do not exoticize, stigmatize, or exercise violence in some other manner. There is a lack of pictures taken by Roma and Sinti. Personally, I find that there is a lack of pictures of my friends and people similar to them, who would not fit into that report about the homeless families in Görlitzer Park. Filling this gap can contribute to changing our mental images and representations.

In the course of our search for these missing pictures, Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka brought to our attention the photographs of her father. Andrzej Mirga is a Roma man from Czarna Góra in Poland, who now lives in Kraków. Prompted by his ethnology studies at university, Mirga began to document his own family life, taking photos of important events in the villages of Czarna Góra and Szaflary, Poland and encounters with a theater group called Gardzienica towards the end of the 1970s. These photos lay forgotten among other documents for many years, until his daughter Anna rediscovered them when she was still at school.

“This is part of our history. Our family.”

“As a young scholar, I was interested in documenting things about us, as family life. There are some pictures of ceremonies like funerals, which are very private. I was very much aware what the value, both archival and historic, of a picture is,” Andrzej Mirga said when I asked what motivated him to take these photos. “They show a world that has changed a lot since then,” Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka adds.

Yet what is it that differentiates these pictures from other anthropological photographic documentation of Sinti and Roma? Mirga himself points to a key difference between his gaze, his photographs and other anthropological pictures of Sinti and Roma:

Exactly this change of perspective, and the emotions wrapped up with them, are what interest me.

If I understand the emotions that an image provokes, I can feel the same emotions, empathize more easily – just like in personal interactions. Those photographed trust Mirga, the photographer – and us viewers – enough to reveal some facets of their everyday lives, enabling us to take a mental trip to their homes. Trust is a political statement, a call to look beyond clichés and make a more realistic image for ourselves.

How can we tell complex (visual) stories about Sinti and Roma without ethnicizing them?

When I show Mirga's photos to Anna Daróczi, the coordinator of the Phiren Amenca volunteer program in Budapest, her spontaneous questions are: “Do people want to see this? Are they interested if it is not something exotic? I am just wondering because these are family pictures, like everyday pictures of a community, most of them. How can you tell that those people are Roma? And is that important?” Daróczi's associations and questions are relevant to more than just these pictures; they have accompanied our project over the past few years. How can we tell complex (visual) stories about Sinti and Roma without ethnicizing them? Do these images hold potential for identification – for Sinti und Roma, and perhaps for all others, due to their universality? Can we perhaps, by showing such images, create spaces in which Sinti and Roma are represented in a realistic and complex manner?

Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka – an anthropologist, activist and RomArchive curator – notes that it is a specific aspect of her first encounter with the photos that makes them so special to her:

The everyday scenes in the photographs of Andrzej Mirga also inspired his niece, the artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, who lives in Czarna Góra, in making some of her own paintings. “Her paintings bring out the magical realism that is hidden behind these kinds of everyday things,” says her cousin Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka. And if we look closely, we find the magic of the everyday and the invisible in the photos, too.

Rights held by: Astrid Oelpenich (text) — Agi Bezeczky (translation) | Licensed by: Astrid Oelpenich (text) — Agi Bezeczky (translation) | Licensed under: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International | Provided by: RomArchive