ANYONE who’s been fortunate to see the award-winning work by photographers Tina Carr and AnneMarie Schone, which has been exhibited at leading galleries and museums in England and Wales, will be aware that they make a unique empathetic connection with their subject matter, whether it’s the dispossessed mining communities in the Welsh valleys, the industrial reaches of the Tyne or landscapes despoliated by industrial production and human neglect.

Their latest book From The Horse’s Mouth: A Roma/Gypsy/Traveller Landscape is very much a continuation of their work in producing not only stunning imagery but also in using their images to raise consciousness about people whose lives are marginalised, ignored or under threat.

The book is the end product of the five years the pair spent travelling in Hungary and Britain, where they photographed the lives of the Roma, Gypsies and Travellers.

In Hungary, they lived and worked with the Roma in Budapest and the teleps (settlements) in the north east of the country. Europe’s largest landless minority, the Roma have no country of their own, a barely recognised flag and are among the poorest, most isolated and most disenfranchised people on earth.

Today they survive mostly on the margins: “Where the tarmac ends the settlement begins,” Carr says, with no proper sanitation, legal electricity supply and only a few standpipes for water.

In the cities they live in ghettos where they are now having to fight gentrification as well as marginalisation and poverty.

Racism has become so rife in Hungary that the Roma often live in fear for their lives. The threat comes from far-right political parties such as Jobbik who now have several seats in the Hungarian Parliament and a banned paramilitary wing, the Hungarian Guard, who parade openly and violently.

Our “homegrown” Romanies, Gypsies and Scottish Gypsy Travellers share the same roots as the Roma, although Irish Travellers have their own distinctive ethnic origins.

Originating in India, not Egypt as was once commonly believed, their language Romanes has its origins in Sanskrit.

Dispersed to the west by migration, slavery and war, they suffered enforced settlement, assimilation, prejudice and mass murder in the Holocaust. Percentage-wise, as many Gypsies as Jews were murdered in what they call the Porrajmos — the Devouring.

“In Britain Gypsies and Travellers are being forced into culturally inappropriate bricks and mortar,” says Carr. “They live on overcrowded sites or by the roadside, desperately seeking non-existent pitches in an attempt to keep their culture alive while grappling with the challenges of a modern world in the digital age.”

Carr and Schone witnessed at first hand the brutal eviction at Dale Farm, Essex, in October 2011, which served no purpose other than to make the Travellers — who owned the land and spent their own money clearing the scrapyard from it and put in services and roads — homeless once again. Twenty families still remain four years later on the access road to the site without water and sanitation. Their children play in close proximity to the old, rat-infested and asbestos-polluted land.

While the photographs in this book graphically and movingly illustrate the situation of these marginalised people in Hungary and Britain, the wealth of colourful photographs are unerringly upbeat and positive. They’ve been described by the Gypsies themselves as a “bit of a family album” in that they are intimate, personal and often happy, belying the background and circumstances of many of the inhabitants of the images.

An added bonus is that the photographs are accompanied by illuminating essays and distinctive voices from Romany Elders and distinguished members of the communities themselves such as Professor Ian Hancock, Agnes Daroczi, Stef Solomon Bate, Jake Bowers, Shamus McPhee, Roseanna McPhee and Kathleen McCarthy.

As such, it’s a marvellous combination of the visual, educational and agitational which merits a wide readership.

Published by Hexexpress, From the Horse’s Mouth is available online, price £30 plus p&p, from www.hexpress.bigcartel.com.