BAXT

In this extraordinary book of color photographs, Andrew Miksys delves deep into the heart of the Roma (Gypsy) community of Lithuania. Miksys spent several years in Lithuania and has produced a body of work that has succeeded in joining Roma people to feel them from inside and not as yet another casual Western observer having a field trip to some ethnographic zoo. The book also contains an essay by poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu who explores Miksys’ photography and the context of the post-Soviet world where the pictures were taken. As Codrescu writes in his essay, “If Andrew were merely an ambitious photographer, he could have chosen to jam his images with enough information to keep busy any number of spectators. As it is, viewers both familiar and unfamiliar with history, Soviet history, Lithuania, Romas, or Lithuanian Roma can expend a great deal of useful exegetic energy looking into these pictures. But Andrew is not merely ambitious, he’s great. I say this fully aware of how difficult it is to make such a freighted judgment. His greatness lies, I believe, in the extraordinary swiftness with which he establishes a relationship with his subjects, a relationship that is unfailingly empathetic.”