Das Kreuz der Zigeuner

Curatorial Note

Published in West Germany in 1975, Das Kreuz der Zigeuner is a photographic essay by writer Rainer R. Günther and photographer Rainer Knubben documenting the Romani pilgrimage associated with Sara Kali at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, southern France. Through approximately eighty full-page photographs accompanied by Günther's text, the volume records religious devotion, pilgrimage, social gathering, mobility, and public representations of Roma and Gitans around one of Europe's most prominent Romani pilgrimage sites. Beyond its documentary subject, the book is significant as an example of the ways Roma communities were photographed and interpreted by non-Romani West European authors during the 1970s. Its imagery and accompanying narrative therefore function both as documentation of the pilgrimage and as a historical record of contemporary representational frameworks. Later scholarship has drawn attention to Günther's tendency to interpret the Gitans encountered at Saintes-Maries through an idealized notion of an ostensibly more “authentic” Eastern European Gypsy identity, making the volume particularly relevant to the critical study of photographic representation, exoticism, and the construction of Romani identity in twentieth-century European visual culture.