Life Among the Gypsies provides visitors with a visual representation of the life experiences of Jan Yoors, a Belgian, and his documentation of Roma history, customs and culture during the years leading up to World War II. Yoors (1922-1977) left his comfortable middle class family at the age of 12 to travel with a band of Lowara gypsies he met near the outskirts of Antwerp. The 34 black and white photographs in this exhibit provide a rare and unfiltered glimpse in the life of the Roma, a little understood people who have been persecuted through history and to this day.

Over a six year period Yoors immersed himself in the daily life and customs of his adoptive Roma family, returning to his birth family in the winter. When World War broke out, he joined the British Army. While in Paris awaiting passage, he was asked by British intelligence to recruit the Romanies to help Allied intelligence units.

Yoors and his Roma friends helped to smuggle arms to the resistance. The entire group was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. Yoors was thrown into solitary confinement in La Santé Prison in Paris, where he was sentenced to death, tortured and imprisoned for a year. His Roma friends and family were shipped to concentration camps.

Mistakenly released, Yoors briefly returned to work as a spy, impersonating an SS officer and helping to transport downed pilots, intelligence officers, and others to safety from behind enemy lines. Captured again at the age of 20, he was imprisoned until the end of the war in Franco’s notorious Miranda concentration camp. Sadly, nearly every member of his Romani family died in Auschwitz. 

After the war, Yoors not only continued his photography, he became a writer, painter, filmmaker, sculptor and a master tapestry maker. His art has been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. Two of his books (The Gypsies and Crossing) are still considered seminal works.

Yoors continued to photograph Roma life around the world until his death, at the age of 55, in November 1977.