Tracing the Roma from India to Montenegro.

“My language is visual. I’m neither a sociologist, nor a journalist, nor an anthropologist—well, perhaps marginally so.”

Christine Turnauer is a photographer with a passion. Her fascinating images focus on that which is magically unusual about everyday life. She has applied this approach to her latest series of photographs detailing her search for Roma history.

Her documentation begins in Gujarat and Rajasthan in northwestern India, where the European Roma have their roots. There, she meets camel dealers, basket weavers, acrobats, and musicians—representatives of the professions she consistently encountered as she traced the Roma through Hungary, Romania, Montenegro, and Kosovo. The results of her travels are photographs whose fairytale-like quality conceals the stories of suffering contained within—stories that emerge when the marks of poverty or war injuries come to light.