ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Roma photography, which is defined simply as the photographing of people of Romani ethnic descent. Such photography has often been controversial, from its early association with Nazi anthropologists, to more recent art and human rights photography that appropriates specific images to make political claims on behalf of Roma. The chapter explores the work of several emblematic Roma photographers, focusing on how their photographs condition how people look at Roma today: from the photographs of Hanns Weltzel and Eva Justin in Nazi Germany; to Josef Koudelka's famous photographs of Czechslovakian Roma; and Chad Evans Wyatt and Livio Mancini's contemporary human rights Roma photography. Roma photography has become politicised either through its association with particularly violent events, such as the Roma genocide, or through its de-contextualisation as a result of wide circulation years after the initial photographic moments, or through problematic practices of cropping, which purposefully distort the original intention of the photograph.
