By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star
Within days of beginning work as a staff photographer at the Prague Post in the Czech Republic, Julie Denesha was warned by her colleagues: “You have to watch out for the Gypsies.”
“They’re criminals; they don’t want to work,” was the common refrain.
These stereotypes and the general feeling of resentment against the Roma, as many Gypsies call themselves, set off Denesha’s internal alarm.
“It was the same stuff you hear about any minority group,” the Merriam native said, surrounded by 45 photographs from her “Gypsies of Slovakia” exhibit, now at the Landon Gallery on Southwest Boulevard.
Slovakia’s half-million Roma are the country’s second largest minority after Hungarians.
Denesha’s images offer an intimate picture of Roma life.
Women prepare meals, children play, men weave baskets and chop wood in decrepit apartment buildings and dilapidated rural shacks without benefit of basic city services such as running water and garbage pickup.
“We all walk around with these ideas about other people,” Denesha (pronounced den-i-SHAY) said. “The truth is far more interesting.”
By 2003, when she began her Roma series, Denesha had covered the war in Kosovo and done extensive reporting on Central and Eastern Europe for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek and other publications. She also had gained some familiarity with Roma culture from freelance assignments.
Every couple of years a publication would send her to a Roma settlement for half a day to do a story on the life and conditions of these “outsiders,” who trace their origins to northwestern India and are darker skinned than ethnic Slovaks. Many were killed in Nazi concentration camps.
“I always felt I was missing something,” Denesha said.
She decided that the only way to get at the “truth” was to live among the Roma.
With a grant from the Puffin Foundation, she lived with Roma families for four months in 2003, when Slovakia was poised to join the European Union.
The goal, she said, was “to disappear into the rhythms of life and see the people rather than the poverty.”
Denesha held out hope that the requirements of EU membership would translate into better treatment and conditions for the Roma, but in 2007, when she returned for six more months with funding from a Fulbright and a Milena Jesenska Fellowship, she found little had changed.
Although her images do not ignore the hardships and squalor of the settlements, their focus is the close-knit Roma family.
“The family builds the home together,” Denesha said.
Typically a daughter-in-law moves in and learns from her husband’s mother.
What surprised her, Denesha said, was how much the woman’s role in the household is valued and respected in Roma culture.
An image of a little boy watching as his grandmother, mother and aunt prepare a meal captures a common domestic routine.
“They’re very interested in sharing recipes,” Denesha said. “They’d cook from scratch these amazing things.”
Another image shows a man chopping wood in the village of Rakusy, where wood-burning stoves are the only source of heat in the settlement’s log cabins.
In her months with the Roma, Denesha was keenly attuned to moments of joy. One striking image shows teenagers dancing on an apartment balcony strung with laundry. Another captures little boys swarming over an abandoned car that their parents would take apart and sell for metal.
One of the most captivating shots shows two little girls walking down a forest path with a bucket of kindling. The kerchiefs on their heads are actually “pants with zip-off legs that they made into cool hats,” Denesha said.
Outside the settlements, life is difficult for Roma children. They speak Roma at home but must learn to speak Slovak in the Slovak schools they attend. When the language barrier causes them to fall behind, they are placed in special schools for slow learners, where most of the children are Roma.
Denesha’s Roma images also provide a fascinating glimpse of life after communism in Eastern and Central Europe.
“I’m fascinated with the old communist empire,” she said. “I came of age in the 1980s when Russia was the Evil Empire. I’m always skeptical of what people say is bad.”
The story of Nicholas and Alexandra (Russia’s last imperial family, murdered by the Bolsheviks), fired Denesha’s imagination when she read it in junior high.
Her fascination with Russia continued at the University of Kansas, where she graduated in 1993 with degrees in journalism and Russian language and literature.
After graduation she worked as a staff photographer for The Kansas City Star for two years before moving to Prague.
With the collapse of the Communist regime and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the mid-’90s were a time of economic turmoil and widespread unemployment. The Roma were hit particularly hard, Denesha said.
Tough economic times heightened resentment of the Roma people. In the 1990s they frequently were targets of violence.
Denesha documented the bloody aftermath of one attack that took place in 2000 in a suburb of Zilina. A mother intervened — and subsequently died from her injuries — when two intruders broke into her home and began beating her daughters with baseball bats.
“There’s so much misunderstanding that they’re not really seeing each other,” she said of the relationship between ethnic Slovaks and the Roma. “I wanted to create a window.”
In each village Denesha would meet with the Gypsy mayor, or vajda, before she began taking photographs.
“I can do this project,” she would say.
“I can’t promise change, but this is my hope.”
ON EXHIBIT
The show: “Gypsies of Slovakia”: Documentary Photography by Julie Denesha
Where: Landon Gallery/Sabrina Staires Studio, 329 Southwest Blvd.
When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday- Friday and by appoint- ment. The exhibit has been extended through Nov. 2.
How much: Free
For more information: 816-474-4771 or
www.juliedenesha.comLabels: Czech, Gypsy, Gypsy Family, Julie Denesha, Photos, Roma, Slovakia, Slovenia Europe
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