Description

Koudelka began photographing the Roma of his native Czechoslovakia, or Gypsies as they were known at the time, in 1961 and continued for a decade. This was a personal undertaking, intended to preserve the vanishing culture of a group targeted for assimilation. This image, taken in Bohemia in western Czechoslovakia, suggests both assimilation—in the form of a settled residence instead of nomadic life, a rather elegant couch, and a besuited young man—and, in his wild grin as he smokes a cigar, the independence of the Roma spirit.