Ester Vonpon

For hours we played soccer in the fields outside the town. And the walks, taken aimlessly throughout the hilly landscape. On these walks the children told me stories, the stories of the masked men, the men that fell on the town, the ones who fell on them in the night. Sometimes, after, the women of the family would invite me for a cup of coffee in their home. And drinking mocca from the cups, reading fortunes from the coffee grounds left behind… We laughed, we danced, we sang. I still visit this same Roma family which lives as a minority in a Serbian enclave of a town protected by UN-KFOR troops.

The people like the ones on my photos are perhaps like the millions whose lives are shaped by this contemporary struggle for existence. The exercise of their powers is limited, for their children and themselves to secure any livelihood… They fight just to survive. But in their eyes is not despair but the power of life itself. For me those photos stand for the power of human existence itself, an everlasting mystery that fascinates me as an artist. They go beyond place and time of creation. Moving so to speak, between the passage of time, the document… The picture itself.

Ester Vonpon