Photography - Sarah Bancroft on a rare insight into the secretive world of Romanian gypsies
In the space of four days at the beginning of this month, photography seized centre stage in London with exhibitions opening at the two Tates, Serpentine and Whitechapel.
Two hundred and fifty miles north, Side Gallery in Newcastle, together with its parent, the Amber collective, has dedicated itself to "the real in the 20th-century photograph" - as Tate Modern's "Cruel and Tender" exhibition is subtitled - for 30 years. Now it is hosting Karen Robinson's "Roma: gypsy villages in Romania". The display is a quiet demonstration both of Side's continued commitment to documentary photography and of the problems that plague such a project today.
The 36 images were taken in three settlements in the summer of 2000, the year the media were full of reports of indignant hostility towards the gypsy "scroungers" arriving at British ports. Robinson journeyed back to their starting point in an attempt to find out what had driven them so far from home. The result, as it is shown here three years later, is at once remarkable and deeply frustrating.
Remarkable, because there are some beautiful images here - both colour and black and white - and because they were taken over just three days (although we are not told this in the exhibition). Frustrating, because what appears as a triumph in terms of access to people with a reputation for secrecy (and good reasons for being suspicious of strangers) is deceptive. There are many instances where Robinson is apparently warmly included; children introduce precious possessions - geese, chicks, horses; adults open their homes or allow her into circles of card games or a gathering with the bulibasha (the settlement's headman). But the pictures offer little wider context. We cannot see the edges of these communities. Should we read the puzzled eyes, folded arms as indicators of the discrimination and suffering that statistics easily communicate? (In eastern Europe, where the Roma constitute a substantial minority, their children are often placed in schools for the mentally disabled, their unemployment rates exceed 70 per cent, housing segregation is pervasive and the police seem to believe that criminality is an intrinsic part of Roma make-up.) Or is this aloofness simply a response to a stranger with a camera?
It is tempting to read the reds and greens that dominate the rich patterns of women's clothing and interiors hung with drapes and carpets as the colours of passion and nature. Are these the colours that keep the spirits of the poorest alive? In comparison, the prosperous Buzescu, the third village Robinson visited, appears grey, drawn to imitation (with its Italian-style villas) and unyielding.
One of the most striking images, from the shanty town Lumga Noua ("the new world"), of a pregnant woman whose waters have just broken, encapsulates the complex relationship between photographer and subject. Moments earlier, we have seen Borca Sorina sweeping her one-room home, a shy infant in tow; the next, life has taken over and she is hastily preparing herself for the birth: naked, pendulous and oblivious to the camera. It is a stunning picture but, in this collection, its beauty is iconic not engaging.
What these pictures lack are clear voices. We can spin stories around them, but there is not enough information for us to know how true they might be. Articulating histories can be achieved in a number of ways: literally, using text, as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, an Amber photographer, did in her books Byker and Step by Step; entirely visually, like Chris Killip, another recorder of the north-east, in his bleak In Flagrante, where the pictures are crowded with structure and content; or by flavouring the documentary approach with constructed elements, as, for example, the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, on display in Side's lower gallery, does to great effect.
It is a factor of economics and contemporary values that Robinson did not have the time these approaches require and has not returned to Romania to show this work to its subjects. Only think how strange it would be for a Roma photographer to picture white Britain and you have a sense of the awkward power relations involved; of the ease with which photographs such as these can slip towards an anthropological fascination with an underprivileged but colourful other.
The exhibition forms part of the Newcastle Gateshead Gypsy Festival, a multi-arts exploration of Roma culture. I suspect Side's choice of Robinson over, say, Josef Koudelka or Donovan Wylie, both of whom photographed gypsies and travellers over several years, may have been influenced by a desire to promote less exposed work. And there may not have been the resources to find or commission a Roma photographer. However, "Roma: gypsy villages in Romania" raises many more questions than it answers.
"Roma: gypsy villages in Romania" is at the Side Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 (0191 232 2208) until 6 July
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