商品簡介
Fifty-five years after famed photographer Josef Koudelka published his seminal work, Gypsies, documenting European Roma families, photojournalist Cristina Salvador Klenz brings us a similar collection of rare, intimate black-and-white images--this time featuring the Roma families of California.
By taking us behind the scenes of an ethnic minority largely unknown and yet routinely reduced to stereotypes by mainstream America, Klenz captures the celebrations, social structures, and struggles of a culture that has survived centuries of discrimination and persecution.
Hidden: Life with California's Roma Families is the first photography book to feature Romani Americans. Beginning in 1990, Klenz spent several years following a number of families belonging to various "nations" of Roma and documenting their lives on black-and-white, 35mm film. With a foreword by Ian Hancock, widely considered the world's preeminent Romani scholar, Hidden provides historical as well as social context for the book's 100 photographs. It was lavishly printed in duotone by Italian printer Editoriale Bortolazzi-Stei (EBS).
Although the Roma are still widely known in English by the exonym "Gypsies," this book comes amidst a global movement away from the word, which is increasingly considered an offensive pejorative.
Since their exodus from India more than a thousand years ago, the Roma have migrated all over the globe. Klenz's work features various nations, including the Kalderash and Machvaya, whose ancestors were kept as slaves in Eastern Europe for 500 years, until 1856; the Xoraxay, whose people arrived in California after extended stays in Chile; the Mihais, who immigrated to the United States from Colombia; and the Ludar, who were forbidden from speaking their native tongue during slavery times and therefore had lost the Romani language entirely by the time they encountered Klenz.
Given their widely divergent paths to America, many Romani-American nations today have little social contact with each other, but the groups have been brought together in this set of photographs in the hope that readers gain a greater understanding of Romani-American history, life, family, and tradition.
