Viva Roma

In “Gypsies” (powerHouse Books, $45), out in May, the photographer Patrick Cariou retraced the migration of the Romany people from northern to southern Europe, the Middle East and ultimately India, their ancestral homeland. Along the way, he encountered Gypsies making sausage on the floor of a Romanian hovel and living in weirdly beautiful shantytowns in Slovakia and tents in Afghanistan. In France, he found more prosperous Roma, whose Gypsy caravans now include Ferraris and inflatable kiddie pools filled with ice and Kronenbourg beer. Meanwhile, Iain McKell’s “The New Gypsies” (Prestel, $40) zooms in on a group unrelated to the Roma, the anarchic vagabonds known in Britain as “horse-drawns,” who coalesced with anti-Thatcherite movements in the 1980s. They have fair skin, and their wagons recall medieval fairs more readily than Romania, but the kinship between these Gypsy tribes, new and old, seems somehow more than contrived.

Read Iain McKell’s introduction to “The New Gypsies”: