Outside the Frame: A Critique of Chad Evans Wyatt’s RomaRising

Photographer Chad Wyatt’s RomaRising is an extensive series of black and white portraits of middle-class European Roma who have a wide range of professional occupations. By constituting the Romani subject as middle class, the exhibit defies stereotypes about this maligned group. Two key questions may be raised about its implications: Does RomaRising infer that acceptance of Roma in European society is conditional upon gaining admission to the middle class? And does the way in which the images are  framed exclude their social context? Specifically, does it neglect the powerful barriers to Roma’s class mobility caused by widespread anti-Roma racism in European society? When these questions are positioned in the foreground and analyzed, emphasis shifts from the content of the images to the social and political consequences of representing Roma through the photographic image.