For several years I photographed a large family of Gypsies who lived in Los Angeles. The project began as a study of the Richards, a particularly clannish, urban American family and members of an ethnic group largely invisible in American life. Then it became an inquiry into the nature of a deeper question about our relationship to strangers. Everyone who came to visit was somehow, through blood or marriage, a relative. When I met Rachel, mother of four and grandmother of seventeen, she told me “We are Gypsies. Let me tell you something about Gypsies…all that stuff you hear about us, well, we don’t steal your babies and eat them.”
