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Bright Balkan Morning

Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia

Blau's photographs (c. 180 black and white pictures) range across the works and days of the Romani instrumentalists, including pictures of parades, parties, weddings, baptisms, and wrestling matches;  intimate portraits of the musicians and their families, studies of domestic life and economic activity in the Romani neighborhood and in the surrounding fields. Blau has re-photographed Romani family albums and includes many of these images as well.
  
The Keils situate the Roma of Iraklia within the cultural, historical, and economic setting of Greek Macedonia, describe a wedding, a baptism party, a Saint's day sequence of performances.  In addition, Angeliki Keil has edited eight first-person Romani life stories and a neighborhood
conversation that, taken together, provide an unprecedented Romani perspective on 20th century Greece and Europe.

 

Photographs by
Dick Blau

Text by
Angeliki Vellou Keil
and
Charles Keil

Soundscape by
Steven Feld

 

 

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