Schmitz displays a gift for translating hidden radiance into pictures, and she deftly wields artificial light to focus our minds on the sources of this inner luminosity. In Istanbul, the flash provided “a way to be able to show what I wanted to show,” she says, particularly when working indoors. In some hands, a strong flash can have an isolating, even frightening effect, but it works very differently in these images. It affirms the subjects, charging their presence, bringing them near to us, at times almost transfiguring them, rendering them at once earthly and holy. Schmitz’s Balat is a place of living icons. At times the brightness gives the people in these photographs a look of marble sculptures, but unlike the classical figures of stone we are so accustomed to seeing, here it is not the artist’s gaze but a moment of touch that provides the meaning: a hand resting on a pregnant belly, a forearm cradling a neck, fingers stroking a child’s hair.

The phone line crackles over Schmitz saying the word ‘sculptures’ and I think I hear the word ‘vultures’: a mishearing that carries a truth in its claws. We live in an epoch of camera drones, of the predator’s eye view. This has long been common in photographs of the Roma: in the anthropological shot which has the subject frozen, staring worriedly ahead, as though into the eyes of a lion. Given the history of the Roma, there is of course a profundity to this. But as a much-needed counterpoint, Schmitz offers us human culture as cuddle, as bodily overlap, and also, vitally, as friendship.