Annabel Tremlett illustrates how everyday images can challenge stereotypes of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller people Picturing others Dr Annabel Tremlett is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Portsmouth. British Academy-supported researchers 44 iscrimination against Roma, Gyp- sy or Traveller people is often said to be the last ‘respectable’ form of racism, 1 with the use of offensive terms and blatant prejudicial comments prevalent and uncontested in many pub- lic spheres. Stereotypes of these commu- nities have a strong visual element: from the glitzy world of elaborate Traveller weddings, to the impoverished beggars from Romania on London streets, or the unauthorised encampments of Travellers’ caravans surrounded by spewing rubbish. Such images are heavily selected, edited, sensationalised, and often unrepresenta- tive of the majority of people from these communities, yet are the ones circulat- ed again and again in our media. So how can such entrenched stereotypes be chal- lenged? What would a ‘non-stereotypical’ image of Roma people look like? These are the questions asked by a current British Academy Small Research Grant project, led by myself, Dr Anna- bel Tremlett at the University of Ports- mouth, in partnership with John Oates from the Open University. The basis for the project was a question I grappled with when co-editing a special issue of Iden- tities journal in 2017, entitled ‘Romapho- bia and the media’. Working with Roma and non-Roma authors, the special issue aimed at exposing and deconstructing some of the entrenched racism against Roma across the media in Europe – which can at times be very stark and direct, and at other times nuanced and insidious. Myself and my co-editors, Vera Messing and Angéla Kóczé (both from Hungary, Angéla is also from a Roma background), started to call our special issue the ‘espe- cially depressing issue’, as the persistence of racism against Roma in the media from so many different outputs and countries was relentless. We realised that there seemed to be nothing else on offer to the public about Roma people apart from these negative images, and in turn, this is what we were offering in our journal. We therefore decided to include three articles in our special issue written by profession- al Roma from varying backgrounds, on how they negotiate and challenge prom- inent racism. These articles showed that Roma people are not just the passive vic- tims of racism, but confront and change the way Roma people are perceived. However, whilst this special issue showed the agency of Roma people in re- sisting racism, there was still the question of how the public image of Roma people could be challenged – what could be a visual alternative to ingrained negative stereotypes? I knew, from my own re- search on the everyday lives of Roma peo- ple in Hungary, that they have a lot of joy and warmth in their lives, even in difficult times. I’ve been visiting the same town in Hungary for nearly two decades now (including over four years of living there). This has put me in a very privileged po- sition of seeing those who were children at the start of my research (around 7 or 8 years of age) growing up – they are now in their mid-20s. Over the years I’ve asked them to take pictures of their everyday lives, and then interviewed them on that basis (a research method called ‘photo 1 Sir Trevor Philips, then Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, 2004. D