The Travellers is a long-term photographic project developed within an Irish Traveller family clan in Ireland. Built over several years through ongoing relationships and repeated visits, the work moves between everyday life, family rituals, celebrations and quieter moments inside domestic spaces.
The project reflects on a community shaped by strong continuity across generations, where traditions, social structures and ideas of belonging remain deeply embedded in everyday life. At the same time, younger generations increasingly move within contemporary forms of self-representation and digital culture, creating a subtle tension between inherited values and present-day visual identities.
Rather than approaching the community through social description or stereotype, the work focuses on proximity, atmosphere and the complexity of lived experience.
For the theme “Two Centuries of Light”, The Travellers reflects on the coexistence of different temporalities within contemporary Europe. The photographs explore how inherited ways of life continue to exist alongside the visual language of the present, where histories, identities and ideas of belonging remain in constant negotiation across generations.
Author biography
Birte Kaufmann is a freelance photographer. She lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
A project is completed for her when she has aswered her last question with a photograph.
In 2012 she gratuated from Ostkreuzschool in Berlin, Germany.
So far her work were published and shown in several solo and group shows and festivals in Germany and around the world. She won several awards like the CNN Journalist Award, the Kindernothilfe Media prize, Gute Aussichten- young German Photography or was PDN annual winner and Grants like the Emerging Photographer Fund, the VG Bildkunst artist`s grant and the Wüstenrot documentary photography sponsorship award.
With her work The Travellers she is represented by INSTITUTE.
In 2016 she published her first monograph The Travellers with Kettler Publishing House.