“The portraits in this category serve as markers of social difference, if not deviancy, and as a commentary on issues regarding immigrants, minorities, foreign workers, and the homeless. […] Such images confirm romantic stereotypes of the Roma, typified by their itinerancy, their exotic dress, their music, and their clannish aloofness from the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the pre-WWII Germany. Still, it is surprising that in a portfolio devoted to the metropolis Sander chose to represent gypsies only in the countryside. […] In December 1942, Himmler finally ordered all German gypsies seized and sent to concentration camps. […] From our perspective, as 21st-century, post-Holocaust spectators, we can only see Sander’s bucolic photographs of wandering gypsies through the lens of genocide, a human-rights catastrophe, as a disaster in reverse.”
From People of the Twentieth Century: Group VI, Portfolio 38, Photograph 7