FROM THE BOOK
"This book is a revised and enlarged version of the original, final maquette for
Cikani, Czech for
Gypsies prepared by Josef Koudelka with the graphic designer Milan Kopriva, in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970 and the book was never published.
In Paris, Koudelka started to work with the French publisher, Robert Delpire, on a different book of Gypsy photographs, which was comprised of 60 photographs mostly taken in separate Roma settlements in East Slovakia from 1962 to 1968. It was published by Delpire Editeur in 1975 under the title
Gitans, la fin du voyage and by Aperture in the United States as
Gypsies--with a special edition for The Museum of Modern Art. It remains a seminal book of the twentieth century.
This new extended version consists of 109 photographs taken in what was, at the time, Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain between 1962 and 1971. The word
Gypsies (commonly used when the photographs were taken, before the term
Roma was established) remains the book title."
Introduction, reproduced from Koudelka: Gypsies.
