Photographers and Rroma

Jacques Debot, a French blogger reporting on Rroma Stories, wrote a post on photographs and Rroma. In there, he bemoans the fact that the pictures that are taken all show the same view of Rroma: Poverty, alienation, despair. He wishes that other sides of Rroma could and should be shown, very much in the sense of the Chilean photographer Navarro Vega, who took more differentiated pictures of the poorest under the Pinochet dictature.

While we wholeheartedly support this point of view, we feel one needs to go further: Photographers, and the press in general, have a moral responsibility. They show part of the reality, the visible tip of the iceberg. But they never show the invisible ones, the large majority of Rroma. And thus, they distort the perceptions of this minority.