Your Beautiful Blue Eyes

André Jenö Raatzsch, Jürgen Raatzsch

This performative photographic exhibition asks how, in an age of participation, the social and political importance of photographs of Sinti and Romany are newly constructed.
What do you expect when you view images depicting Roma and Romnija? You won’t find any so-called ‘Gypsy pictures’ in this exhibition. Instead, you’ll encounter images and stories that portray complex historical, social, political, and cultural relationships and meanings developed from the emancipatory and subversive perspectives of the Sinti and Sintizze, the Roma and Romnija. ‘Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.’ This statement, made by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, is further expanded upon by Ariella Azoulay, professor of philosophy and visual culture at the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. In The Civil Contract of Photography, she includes everything involved in the photographic process: camera, photographer, the person being photographed, onlookers. Above all, Azoulay underscores the responsibility of the person watching toward the person represented: a key question in the exhibition.