This book is a revised and enlarged
version of the original maquette for Josef Koudelka's book Cikбni (Czech
for Gypsies), prepared by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva
in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. However,
Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970, and the book was never published
in that original form. Koudelka's stark images depict the poverty and
clannishness of Gypsy life, but he does not present their situation as a
social problem that should somehow be fixed. Instead, he shows the
Gypsies as perpetual outsiders, and their lives as a primal mix of glee
and wonder, sorrow and mystery. This extended version of the seminal
'Gitans, la fin du voyage' consists of 109 photographs taken between
1962 and 1971 in what was Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and
Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. Sociologist Will Guy,
author of the text that accompanied the first publication of Gypsies,
has contributed an updated essay, tracing the migration of the Roma from
their original homeland in northern India, to their current status -
one that continues to be contested internationally.