Deep-Rooted Roma

Daily Life, first prize stories

00-05-2004

Hundreds of Roma live in dilapidated housing complexes and makeshift settlements in the towns of Trebišov and Košice in eastern Slovakia. The Roma form the second largest minority group in Slovakia, yet as a group tend to suffer disproportionately high rates of unemployment, poverty and disease. Most live in extremely deprived conditions, often in camps in marginal or devastated zones, with few facilities. Improved social welfare and human rights legislation, passed by the Slovak government on the eve of the country's joining the European Union in May 2004, does not appear to have reached the ground. Slovak prejudice against the Roma is deep-rooted.

Commissioned by: Politiken / Rapho for Geo

Location: Trebišov, Slovakia

Photo Credit: Jan Grarup

Jan Grarup has over the course of his 25-year career photographed many of recent history’s defining human rights and conflict issues.

Grarup’s work reflects his belief in photojournalism’s role as an instrument of witness and memory to incite change, and the necessity of telling the stories of people who are rendered powerless to tell their own.

His images of the Rwandan and Darfur genocides provide incontrovertible evidence of unthinkable human brutality, in the hope that such events will never happen or be allowed to happen again. His work, The Boys from Ramallah and The Boys from Hebron, covers both sides of the Intifada expressed through the lives of children coming of age amidst the violence. Grarup’s work takes the viewer to the limits of human despair, dignity, suffering and hope. His images are relevant to us all, because they form a chronicle of the time in which we live, but at times do not dare to recognize.

Grarup has been honored with many of the most prestigious awards from the photography industry and human rights organizations,

including: Eight World Press Photo awards, UNICEF, W. Eugene Smith Foundation for Humanistic Photography, Oskar Barnack award,  POYi and NPPA. In 2005, he was awarded with a Visa d’Or at the Visa Pour l’Image photo festival in France, for his coverage of Darfur’s refugee crisis.

Jan Grarup is represented by LAIF agentur in Germany, and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark