Window on the Roma

Click on the slide show above to see a selection of Julie Denesha’s photographs of the Slovakian Roma. All photos by Julie Denesha

Seven years ago in the Slovakian town of Zilina, a Roma mother of eight tried to stop two men who had broken into her home from beating her daughters with a baseball bat. She failed. Eight days later, 50-year-old Anastazia Balazova died from severe head injuries. Shocked at this random hate crime, photojournalist Julie Denesha decided to create a photographic window onto the world of the Roma, who are otherwise known as Gypsies, and who have been a persecuted minority in Eastern Europe for centuries.

“I thought that if the people who had attacked this family could see how dignified the family was, they might think differently about their neighbors,” says Denesha. Her photographs so impressed the judges of the Milena Jesenská Fellowship, sponsored by BU’s Institute for Human Sciences, that Denesha was awarded a fellowship to continue the project. She will share her experiences and photographs in a presentation titled The Outcasts of Europe: Life Among the Gypsies of Slovakia on Tuesday, February 13.

Denesha, who worked as a photojournalist in Prague from 1996 to 2004 and speaks Czech and Slovak, spent a month each in three Slovakian villages and one urban ghetto. In each village, she lived with a family and for the first week took only a few photos. Instead of taking pictures, she helped out with household chores, such as carrying water and sweeping the floors, until the community felt comfortable with her.

“I try to be as honest with people as possible,” Denesha says. “You can’t make promises to people that if I photograph your village, things will change here. I told them how I was interested in the project and what I was trying to do with it.”

The photographer says the Roma’s cycle of poverty is fed by job discrimination and the practice of placing a majority of children in remedial schools. The Roma receive monthly welfare checks, but they often spend much of the money soon after receiving the checks, leaving little for food in later weeks. One of Denesha’s photos shows a mother giving her children tea — all they would have for days until the next check arrived.

Denesha is careful not to blame Eastern Europeans for discrimination against the Roma. “After the fall of Communism, there was a lot of economic adjustment and a lot of pressure on people,” she says. “In these times there is often tension between groups of people.” She has hope that the European Union’s antidiscrimination laws will force new member countries to treat the Roma differently.

Later this month, Denesha will return to Slovakia to continue documenting the Roma, with help from a Fulbright fellowship and the Milena Jesenská Fellowship. Her work on the Roma has appeared in Time, the Washington Times, and on AOL, as well as in the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, The Economist, and the Christian Science Monitor.

The Milena Jesenská Fellowship enables journalists to expand their knowledge of European social and political issues. Named for a Czech journalist whose resistance to Nazism resulted in her death in a concentration camp in 1944, the fellowship provides a $12,500 stipend and an office in Vienna. Meline Toumani and Alexandra Starr, both New York–based journalists, also received a fellowship this year.

Denesha’s presentation is at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, February 13, at the Photonics Center Colloquium Room, 8 St. Mary’s St. For more of Denesha’s photographs of the peoples of Eastern Europe, visit her Web site.

Catherine Santore can be reached at csantore@bu.edu.