Fifty years ago Rumer Godden's young adult novel The Diddakoi told the story of a half-gypsy girl's struggle to maintain her travelling culture following the death of her wagon dwelling guardian as she is assimilated into a rural community near Rye. As with other depictions of Gypsy, Roma & Travellers (GRT) in literature, film and photography the book's dominant viewpoint is that of the settled community.
Now, in the 2020's, this approach can seem uncomfortably ethnographic and is being challenged by a growing acceptance of the right and importance of different areas of society, especially the marginalised, to define themselves.
For A Town Explores A Book, Jules Earl and Béla Váradi have investigated their own wider communities revealing modern lives that are complex and nuanced, both surprising and surprisingly ordinary.
128 pages of photographs and texts
Currently out of print