Phien’s Plain Talking – On photographers ‘discovering’ the ‘lost tribe of the Pavee’..
I am going to tell you a story. A photographer happens on small site of Travellers. Surprised, because she never knew such people existed, she takes a few snaps. She gets talking to the Traveller women and then decides that this could be an opportunity for a book of pictures to show the world about these strange new people...in a very limited fashion. She is probably oblivious to the numerous books along the same lines to the one she now has in mind.
So she counts the days until she can revisit the country from Germany to photograph the strange culture she has discovered, seemingly unaware that there is a large settlement of Pavee (as Travellers are known in their own language) residing in Germany. It’s a bit like spending 30 years of your life in the jungles of Peru looking for a small lost tribe, only to return home disappointed to find them living above a hairdressers in your town.
The photographer finally gets friendly with the first lot of Travellers she met and start to take photos over a period of four years. On looking at the photos she has produced, it my opinion that it might have been a better idea to let the Travellers take the pictures and then send them to her.
It seems probable to me that when another woman was reviewing the photos, in this article in National Geographic Magazine, she was also struck by the obvious plainness and the sheer ordinariness of her photos. Look lets have it right, a photographer from Germany took some not very good pictures of Travellers in Ireland. Full stop. The only way for the photographer and the reviewer to make them interesting to non-Travellers was to ‘mystify’ the people in them with knowing verbal looks, sage written nods of the head and half comments about the Travelling community.
Worth a book? Well only those paying for such could answer that. Those not paying for such weak-tea publishing will have given their answer.
There is just so much wrong with the review on these pictures - and the whole enterprise. For that's surely what it is – an enterprise - a lazy way to make money using Travellers.
The photographer claims to have been with the Travellers for four years and yet the review refers to them as Irish Travellers rather than Pavee. Did she not get to learn the name of the people in all that time? Or did she but the reviewer chose not to use it? If so she should have stood her ground – she owed it to the Travellers, who strived, she claims, to teach her the secret language. But not their name - Pavee? A name which is now no longer secret but in the public domain. So they taught her the secret language but not their name in that language? Not likely Mikey.
The review makes mention of the Travellers having “thick accents” when speaking in English, people in Ireland having thick Irish accents - now there's a novelty! Has the photographer ever heard Irish accents before? Some Irish accents are so strong you could use them as a diving boards. But I had to smile at the notion of a German person commenting on English spoken in a 'thick' accent.
The review continues along the cheesy route it travels and incorrectly advises its readers that the ‘Travellers’ (Pavee) are an ethnic minority in Ireland. Of course that is a luxury the Pavee do not have in that particular country when it comes to legal recognition by the Government, although there is no question they are indeed an ethnic minority. Now that is a sore point. Not to recognise Pavee as such is a political decision, a decision made, in my opinion, for reason of the massive problem of ingrained racial discrimination of the Irish to the Pavee in Ireland. To cut that causal discrimination out would see the courts overflowing with racial discrimination cases. The Irish country, to its shame, discriminates against the Pavee people. Ireland is a country some Pavee claim as their own, as the earliest indigenous inhabitants, and they point to that as one of the main reasons the Pavee are treated like second class citizens. History suggests the Celts fetched up on the shores of Ireland 2,500 years ago and who did they encounter there? Some would say the Pavees.
The woman with the camera and the woman with the pen do not concern themselves with such niceties when they make their flawed claims about my people, but what does it matter? It’s the pictures that count - right? Oh dear – yes the pictures themselves…
The pictures are that bland the camera owner might have been better to hand her camera to a teenager and then let them photograph what they liked. It would, I’m sure, have given a better set of photos and more insight into the day to day activity of the Pavee than the results we see here.
The review author then coyly informs us that “efforts have been made to incorporate the nomadic group into mainstream culture” and then swiftly moves on from that bombshell of a sentence!
It is a pity the author did not go into how this incorporation is enforced! Criminal laws brought in with the Traveller in mind etc. But then what can be expected from the premise of producing a mildly distracting coffee table set of photos, one for perusing while you are waiting to have your teeth checked at the dentist?
Talking of teeth; the review is cliché ridden to the point of teeth grinding. It is just another review in a long line of such reviews that are really not worth the effort. Why the National Geographic Magazine became involved with this is mystifying. A true waste of time. The Travellers who gave up their time and had to deal with the nuisance of having a photographer in their lives for four years, deserve a better result than the photos offered.
I do hope a book is not planned on the back of this sawdust. It’s shameful that a tree may have to give up an arm and a leg for a copy of such a book to be nailed together, and people buying any such book containing the dross may have to do the same. In my opinion any book containing this set of photos should go straight from the printers to the ubiquitous charity shop, cutting out the middle man. Therefore my advice to any potential purchasers of any such book is to wait a year then and buy it from the stack of them in charity shops, or wait until some cut-price petrol station starts giving one away free with every litre of fuel purchased.
I wait patiently for a book of pictures and review about the Pavee people via a person from one of the lost tribes of Papa New Guinea, in the hope that it might be a bit different and fresh from the various similar picture books we see constantly about Travellers. Forest loads of pulp heaped on us by non-Traveller photographers and writers ‘who stumble upon us’.
Psst... Say nothing - but the photographer thinks she has just discovered the lost tribe of the Pavees….
By Phien O’Phien