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| "WHO WE ARE I asked my parents when I got home from school. was about seven years old in the early fifties. On the tram that afternoon I could not answer my schoolmate`es question "what is your religion". This was the first time that we began to talk at home about minorities, Judaism, forced labour and death camps in Central Europe. My parents had survived. Surrounded by the warmth of my family and the wisdom of three thousand books in the room, it was like a frightening fairy tale, having a bad dreamy walk in a dark, endless tunnel. Later I understood that even if you would like to forget your roots, somebody always will remind you where you are from. WHO ARE THEY murmured to myself looking out of the road while I was driving home in the countryside of Hungary. Some barefoot Roma children stood on the snow and behind them a mud-hump-house was on the snow-covered field alone, far from the village. It was in the late sixties when I first had this dramatic and visual example of the suppressed social problems of Roma people. During those years all the papers were full of nothing but hooray-optimism. As a young and ambitious photojournalist and as an another "Jewish minority" I had a great empathy for Romas. But what else was I able to do, then photographing their life revealing it for the others? As a "champion for the truth" I had the persistence to work on it for many years, although nobody was going to publish any of those "sad" images on a topic which was not in favour with any editors in a communist country. But sometimes miracles do happen: an editor let himself be persuaded to do a photo book publication, on the theory that the courage of facing social problem would rather prove the strength than hurt to a communist system. That was my first photo book (Bucsu a ciganyteleptol) Bidding Farewell To A Roma Colony in 1977." – Tamas Revesz |
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