Daily life with the Roma of Romania

It’s a calling. Romanian photographer Mugur Varzariu, 54, has spent the last fourteen years documenting the persecution of Roma in his country. In his early forties, however, the father of two was still working as a marketing consultant for multinationals and had barely ever touched a camera. “As my children grew up, I decided to give my life a stronger meaning by making images with a social impact,” he recalls.

The self-taught man, “born in Orthodoxy” and whose absolute reference is Nelson Mandela, has placed his path under the sign of “compassion”. At the beginning of 2010, he chose as his first subject the similarities between religions: “I have always found that men expressed their faith through the same essential gestures.” It was also that year that he took his first steps alongside the Roma: “I wanted to denounce xenophobia and the unrealism of the financial incentive to return established by Nicolas Sarkozy (then President of the Republic, Editor’s note) following the beneficiaries who left Paris to visit their relatives in Romania and returned by the first bus.

Mugur quickly became aware that the minority was facing the worst in its own country. From north to south, from east to west, the human rights defender showed communities struck by poverty, lack of access to education, forced expulsions. After his day as a photographer, he multiplied legal proceedings, contributions to Amnesty International reports… And the victories were there, starting with the destruction of the “segregation wall” of Baia Mare, in the north, ordered in February by the court of Maramures. “In our world that is losing hope, this is proof that everyone can move mountains, provided they believe in it.”