‘Come in,” a woman yelled at Sam Wright from her caravan, “you’re gonna get soaked!” He was at the Appleby horse fair in Cumbria to photograph the UK’s Traveller community in June 2020, but wasn’t having much luck in the pouring rain. Over a cup of tea, Corrina Chapman asked if he would take her family’s portrait and then spent the next 10 minutes calling everyone. Parents, uncles, cousins and lots of kids trickled into the caravan until about 12 people were crammed inside. In the chaos, Wright, who had recently become a father, took one of his favourite images, of a man holding a baby; capturing a tender side to Travellers not often seen in the media.
The photographer, whose great-grandmother was of Traveller heritage, wanted to create “a new and more honest portrayal” of the community, who have been caricatured and criminalised for decades. Before photographing the series, Wright had heard the flippantly racist comments Travellers face, being warned that they might be hostile or steal his equipment. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth. They were “really warm, kind, passionate people”, he says. “It was super welcoming.”
Wright has since published a book, Pillar to Post, which puts a softer focus on the young Travellers he met over a two-year period at eight fairs across the UK and Ireland, including in Yorkshire, Norfolk, Cumbria, Galway and Cork. “In the past, it’s always been quite a stark, hard image of the Travelling Gypsy community,” says Wright. Instead, he photographed them predominantly at sunset, using vintage Pentax 67 and Mamiya 645 cameras, to create warm, rich, orange-hazed portraits that do justice to the community he met.
He juxtaposes the traditions of Traveller life with contemporary fashions: homing in on a pair of Nike trainers dangling from a rider on an Irish cob; and capturing a group of young girls in designer clothes, playfully pouting for the camera outside a Romany Gypsy bowtop caravan. In the middle of a horse-haggling moment in the Irish town of Buttevant in County Cork, a young boy called CJ Larry with slicked back hair, in a Hugo Boss tracksuit top and a crisp collared shirt, commands a crowd of buyers with confidence. The picture won Wright a place as a finalist in this year’s Taylor Wessing photo portrait prize.
“The younger generation of Travellers are almost like small adults,” Wright says. “It seems the naivety of childhood is taken quite quickly and they’ve got to grow up fast. They’re very savvy and very confident and super passionate about their community.”
Wright photographs groups of girls whispering to each other as a rollercoaster spins in the background, and others getting a takeaway at the end of the fair. Some young women in figure-flattering outfits, with heavy makeup and long nail extensions, ride horses bareback. “There was a point where I was like, am I sort of caricaturing here by shooting this?” says Wright. But he wanted to show the pride Travellers have in their presentation. It was almost like: “this is how we dress,” he says. “It’s a really strong identity.”
For many, says Wright, the fairs are “a yearly pilgrimage, a way of honouring the traditional way of Traveller life” that is quickly slipping away. One family the photographer got to know would set off from Manchester, where they live in a static home with their five children, and travel by horse and traditional bowtop wagon to Appleby – a journey that would take just two hours by car. At the fair, they would meet another 10,000 Travellers who had also made the journey on horseback, as they have done since the fair started in 1775. “For younger generations that have maybe never experienced living on the road, it’s important for them to experience it,” says Wright.
Today, about 71,400 people living in England and Wales identify as Gypsy or Irish Traveller, but far fewer live on the road year-round. According to the 2011 Census, only 24% lived in a caravan or mobile structure, as successive governments have introduced hostile legislation that has chipped away at their right to roam. “It’s just too dangerous and not fun any more,” Travellers would tell him. They have grown tired of constantly being moved on. “It’s a shame because it’s such a special way of living,” says Wright.
Last year, a human rights body found “troublingly persistent” levels of discrimination towards the Traveller community, with 62% reporting racial abuse. “I feel like it’s one of the last communities that people are openly racist about,” says Wright. He spoke to one 12-year-old boy, Benjamin Jacob Smith, in West Yorkshire, who left school because children and teachers alike had bullied him. He now works for his dad, who is a non-ferrous-metal buyer. “That kind of prejudice and racism has just ended his education basically,” says Wright.
These kinds of conversations were important for the photographer to have with his subjects, all of whom engage with the camera willingly. “I don’t want to walk around and take snaps without anybody knowing about it,” he says. “I like to sit with people and get to know them a little bit and then take the photos.”
It comes naturally to the chatty, Sheffield-born photographer, who honed his skills at DIY punk gigs in pubs, “shooting these characters with great stories”, when he wasn’t playing drums in a band. “I wasn’t drawn to the mainstream way of life,” says Wright, who has since settled in Brighton. It was always “the underdog of society” that interested him more.
The result is a collection of intimate portraits that the photographer believes are true to the Traveller community. He uploads all the images he has taken at the fairs to their respective Facebook groups so they can be downloaded. “I think that actually broke down a few barriers,” says Wright. They could see “what I was doing with the pictures and not trying to discriminate like a lot of press have in the past”.
“Travellers don’t expect miracles in how we are depicted. We know our faults better than anyone,” writes Damien Le Bas, a British artist from Irish Traveller heritage associated with the Outsider Art movement, at the back of Pillar to Post. “We don’t want special treatment. But we do expect people who talk about us to try and tell the truth.”
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Pillar to Post is published by Gost, £45. The Taylor Wessing Prize is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 16 February
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