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Terms and conditions of use
Gypsies
(Gitans)
(c. 1930)
Medium
gelatin silver photograph
Measurements
(18.7 × 17.0 cm)
Credit Line
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Gallery location
Special Exhibitions Gallery
Ground Level, NGV International
About this work
Much of Nora Dumas’s 1920s and 1930s photography documented rural French life, capturing the daily lives of peasants and farmers. Her sharply focused images were regularly published in popular French magazines of the interwar period, including Vu, Bifur and L’Art Vivant. Dumas took this photograph from a low perspective with her camera pointing up, such that the people appear monumental. There is a feeling of empathy to the image, in keeping with the humanist documentary photography that Dumas practised, and which was promoted by Hungarian immigrant photographers such as Brassaï, Ergy Landau and André Kertész.