Carlo Gianferro

Iasi, Romania 2008

Carlo Gianferro (b. 1970, Italy), is a freelance photographer based in Rome, he worked from 2004 to 2008 with the Romanian and Moldavian wealthy Roma communities, as a result of this long term project he published two books “Gypsy Architecture” by German Axel Menges Editions and “Gypsy Interiors” published by Italian Postcart Edizioni. In these years he carried on personal projects in Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East. He’s actually working on Italian issues exploring mental illness subject. He’s interested in exiled workers and other fragile communities. His photographs document people conditions and show them in their environment where the architectural setting or backdrop is just as important as the human figures . His work was awarded 1st prize for portraits stories in World Press Photo 2009.

About the Photograph:

“I took this photograph during one of my t travels among the wealthy Roma communities of Romania and Republic of Moldova, I was shooting a series of portraits for ‘Roma Interiors’, my more successful work, documenting some Roma villages created after the 1992 fall of the Soviet regime in eastern Europe, a new generation of Roma that quickly developed its full potential, accumulating wealth using capitalist methods and expressing it by the construction of the huge houses. I wanted to show Gypsy people in a new way; no more beggars or the poor living in camps as always described in photography before. That day I was in a small rich Roma village near Iasi, Romania, I knocked the door of a villa and this woman appeared to me , she was very kind and very happy to be photographed, she conducted me in her bedroom. I prepared my tripod and my camera and when I looked at the viewfinder I saw the magic, a woman in orange in an orange room next to plastic plant. This picture as the others in the series, was photographed quickly, without prior preparation, aesthetic tricks or any special choice of clothes: what you see is what there is, what there was at the time of the shooting, what there is every day.”