EIGEN.BILD

Jeannette Gregori, Valérie Leray, Nihad Nino Pušija

From the very beginning, photography has played an ignominious role for the Sinti and Roma. As a medium for stereotyping, voyeuristic exoticism, and National Socialist ‘racial research’, it contributes to the phenomenon of antiziganism to this day. In her series Nomads, Valérie Leray visits the abandoned locations where Sinti and Roma were held prisoner in camps; her photographs are a search for traces existing somewhere between the medium’s aesthetic presence and the absence of memory. In Proud to be Roma, Jeannette Gregori portrays the Manouches, the Roma in France of today – sometimes in their traditional environment, and sometimes in places one would least expect them to be. Nihad Nino Pušija shows new, self-assured portraits of the artists of the first Pavilion of Sinti and Roma at the 2007 Venice Biennale. He combines these with additional portraits taken from his many person-to-person encounters. With EIGEN.BILD, the three photographers present their personal view of the past and present, the utopia of a free Europe of the future.