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Book Intro
2nd page of 4

But I had more than prejudice to fuel my distrust of people outside my family. I was in fear that they would take my mother away just like they had taken my father. You see, my parents were not only hippies, they were political refugees. Fed up with seeing their family and friends die in a war they did not understand, the Vietnam War, my parents spoke out against it, resulting in them getting blacklisted by the US government.

This was in the early ‘70’s, around my birth, and the result of my parents’ actions meant my first 17 years were spent on the run from the international police, or Interpol. We traveled constantly. Even after my father was caught when I was 6, my mother took her three children and kept running. With different names and different stories, we would arrive at a new place in the hopes of settling down just to realize Interpol had caught sight of our whereabouts and that we had to pick up and go in the dead of night.

Granada, Spain, 1997

It was only when my mother turned herself in that they finally stopped chasing us. She was the longest standing fugitive in the history of the United States. After a long court battle where her layer proved that she was giving birth to her now 17-year-old son (me) when the bombings happened she was acquitted of all charges.

We were now free to settle for long as we liked. I no longer had to fear loosing my mother. I could tell people my real name. It was not that easy.

This kind of childhood is not forgotten. 17 years of fear had instilled in me a deep mistrust of authority and mainstream attitudes. While young and still under the wing of my family I was not bothered by this, since I enjoyed the community I belonged to and knew no better. But once the urgency of being on the run was lifted, I realized how alienated I felt.

This is when I started photographing Roma. I think for me the Roma were a safe transition point in my journey from youth to manhood. They were sufficiently similar to me in their sense of community and isolation from the mainstream, allowing me a sense of security, yet they were also different enough to make me feel like I was breaking away and finding my own ways in the world.

But more importantly, spending time with the Roma helped alleviate my sense of alienation from the world at large. Here was a group different from mine, yet I found I could connect nonetheless. I even found that the differences were not so important; that they too were just as personable and human as the people I had grown up with. It was the confirmation I needed to begin narrowing the divide I had always felt between the mainstream and myself. But all this is in hindsight.

The way I started photographing Roma was much more an act of fate than any conscious decision on my part. I was 18 and staying with a group of childhood friends on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, Spain, in a house we had rented for the summer. None of us worked a steady job. Some did gardening or construction, others peddled clothes at the market, others sold drugs. We spent most of our days partying. Ibiza is the island of parties.

We stayed up until dawn, slept, and lazed around on the beach. This was the lifestyle of our parents and we had inherited it. Originally, it was based on a political statement, a rebuttal of oppressive religion, corrupt government, and consumerism, but we didn’t pay too much attention to that. We were too busy having fun. We saw this as a political statement in itself.

Yet I became restless. The parties and lazing about began to bore me. I started to keep different hours. When my friends came home from their nights out, the sun slowly turning the dark skies pale blue, I would wake up and go out to explore the island.