This book is a revised and enlarged version of the original maquette for Josef Koudelka's Cikáni (Czech for Gypsies) prepared by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopřiva in 1968, and intended for publication in Prague in 1970. Koudelka left Czechoslovakia in 1970 after extensively documenting the Russian invasion of Prague in August 1968. The book was never published in that original form.

This extended version consists of 109 photographs taken between 1962 and 1971 in what was, at the time, Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France, and Spain. The word Gypsies (the common name for this group when the photographs were taken between 1962 and 1971, before the current term Roma was established) is used as the book title.

Sociologist Will Guy, author of the text that accompanied the first publication of Gypsies, has contributed an updated essay, tracing the migration of the Roma from their original homeland in northern India, to their current status-one that continues to be contested internationally.