Sevla

Paolo Pellegrin’s intimate portrait of a Roma matriarch and her family explores the bonds that anchor human relationships.

Europe’s roughly 12 million Roma - often stereotyped as “gypsies” - have long faced discrimination, poverty, and exclusion, despite centuries of presence on the continent since their arrival from northern India. Yet hardship does not define Roma identity. Family life, celebrations, and daily rituals are just as central, and it’s this side of the community that Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin chose to highlight, avoiding the usual narratives of suffering.

“There is a very strong sense of family,” he said. “People may leave and return, but they remain united.”

Pellegrin met Sevla, a Roma woman from Bosnia, in Rome in 2015 while working on the Rome Commission, which invites international photographers to interpret the city freely. Wanting a more personal angle, he focused on Rome’s vast outskirts - where he encountered Sevla’s large family.

Decades earlier, as a young photographer in the late 1980s, Pellegrin had documented a Roma camp in Bosnia. By coincidence, Sevla came from the same village he had photographed nearly 30 years before. Since settling in Rome in the 1980s, her family has grown to include nine children and more than thirty grandchildren, the younger generations speaking fluent Italian and bridging cultures.

Pellegrin has spent years returning to Rome, at times photographing the family and at others simply living alongside them. Though his work recalls Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies, Pellegrin’s focus is less on origins than on the strength of family ties.

For Sevla, those ties outweigh work or career - values she contrasts with the “gadje,” or non-Roma. Now, a father of two, Pellegrin sometimes takes his daughters to visit Sevla as he enjoys being immersed in the minutiae of a colossal family life: daily moments of swimming, cooking, or celebrating.