A Pinprick Of Light

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              "text": "At the bottom of a big mountain, taller then the tallest trees, lived a blacksmith, Jan. The blacksmith Jan and his wife Helena loved their black children.",
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          "content": [
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              "text": "The blacksmith Jan hammered axes, hoes and nails for horseshoes. He used to put them all into one bag and go sell them to farmers to support his family.",
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              "text": "One day the blacksmith Jan was on his way home, carrying the bag on his shoulder as usual. Feeling very tired, he fell asleep under a tree. An old man came to him in a dream and said: “Why does the sun shine beyond that river? Why do those children have a white skin? Why do those children have laughter in abundance? Why do all of them speak differently?”",
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          "content": [
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              "text": "“Gypsy blacksmith, you have been hammering your poverty for many years now, but you won’t hammer the future. You need to find the Kingdom of Hope. On the way there, you will pass: Fear, Uncertainty, and Despair. But you carry on walking. When you reach the aim, you will see three towers: the Tower of Vanity and Conceit, the Tower of Laziness and Foolishness, and the Tower of Wisdom.”",
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              "text": "“In the Tower of Wisdom, there will be many rooms. Open the one where you will find Knowledge, Reason and Power of Will. Remember: Do not open the grated rooms—they have White, Black and Yellow Thoughts. They prowl, and can catch a man in their snare. Take the Wisdom Stone from the right room.”",
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              "text": "The blacksmith Jan carried on walking, asking the trees: “Is it far to the Kingdom of Hope?” The blacksmith Jan carried on walking, asking the river: “How far will I need to go? Is it a faraway country?”",
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              "text": "When the blacksmith Jan got home, he called his children. “Father, I have a thorn inside me. A voice, that wants to cry out: It’s high time to change yourself, change yourself! Should I jump out from my black skin, to be able to check which one is which?”",
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              "text": "“There is a solution for that”—said the father—”you need to cross a boundary river.” The blacksmith Jan’s children were eager to see the unknown world. Holding each other’s hands, they crossed the river.",
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              "text": "Years passed by. While looking for the Wisdom Stone, the children became more and more curious. They wanted to know more. They wanted to see more. They wanted to feel more. There were many questions troubling them at the same time.",
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              "text": "When the blacksmith Jan suddenly felt old, he called his black children and said: “I have never asked earlier: Why? What for? Where to? Which way? I am still thankful to the mysterious old man from my dream. I do not need to worry anymore. The Wisdom Stone is inside you. You have something that I never had: wings!”",
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IN 2002, the photographer Marta Kotlarska, who goes by the pseudonym Martushka Fromeast, began working on a project featuring residents of a shelter for homeless mothers in Warsaw. In her five months there, she befriended many of the women, and held a four-day workshop on pinhole photography for the shelter’s children.  Two years later, a mother who moved from the shelter to a poor Warsaw neighbourhood asked Fromeast to repeat the workshop at a community centre in the area. The project attracted private funding and significant media attention, and the children’s photographs were exhibited all over Poland.

Encouraged by this success in using art to highlight the situation of a poor community, Fromeast jumped at a friend’s suggestion that she next work with Poland’s Roma community. In the country’s latest census, just over 17,000 people self-identified as Roma, though the country’s actual Roma population is estimated to be significantly higher. As they are elsewhere in Europe, Roma in Poland are marginalised and poor, and face racism, discrimination and widespread negative stereotypes about their ways of life. Through a government department focused on national and ethnic minorities, Fromeast got in touch with Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, an artist and social activist of Roma origin who lives in the Roma settlement of Czarna Gora in the country’s south. The two met, and decided to work together on what they named the Romani Click project.

Since 2007, Fromeast and Mirga-Tas have worked in 11 different settlements, and with Roma migrants from Poland and Slovakia in London. They teach children, and occasionally women too, to build pinhole cameras from readily available objects such as shoeboxes and aluminum cans. The participants then use them to capture moments of quotidian life, and staged scenes to complement poetry and stories written for the project by the Roma storyteller Jan Mirga. They then present these illustrated poems and tales to their neighbours and friends. The results are images of basic composition but startling colour—an effect of the rudimentary cameras—by turns vibrant and eerie.

To contextualise this work, Fromeast cited the photographer Chad Evans Wyatt, author of the project RomaRising, a series of portraits of Roma people that works against prevailing ways of portraying the community. “Consider the ‘Gypsy’ photograph as a text,” Wyatt writes on the project’s website. “What are its usual elements? The first ingredient is exoticism, an ‘otherness’ separating a group from its majority context. This style of photograph … produces a theatre of grotesque characters, irremediably different, without redemption, often emphasising poverty, unbridled ecstasy, rootlessness, irresponsibility.” Romani Click defies this “conventional portrayal technique,” Fromeast said, by putting cameras in Roma hands. News of their work has spread among Polish Roma by word of mouth, and numerous community leaders—otherwise often suspicious of outsiders—have invited Fromeast and Mirga-Tas to continue the project in their settlements.

The text accompanying this selection of photographs is Jan Mirga’s tale ‘The Wisdom Stone.’