The Digital Journalist
→ April 2004 Contents → Dispatches
Palestine Hotel
Everyone is running in the hallways, looking for their flack jacket, searching for a helmet, cursing at the elevator that is just never there when you need it. I've got to file.
by Jerome Delay
Street Level
... the glass from his store windows blew out into the streets and the sidewalk where we were standing rumbled. I saw the black smoke of the explosion a few blocks away and ran towards it.
by Sherrlyn Borkgren

EDITOR'S NOTE:

This month's pair of dispatches from Baghdad make an interesting matchup:

Sherrlyn Borkgren, an American freelance photographer who arrived in Iraq by bus, unaffiliated, unassigned, and in some ways inexperienced, and Jerome Delay, an award winning professional, on assignment in Iraq from France for the AP.

Both grabbed shots of the Mt Lebanon Hotel bombing in Baghdad. Sherrlyn, freelancing for Aurora, was alone on the street at the time of the bombing, and Jerome was in a nearby hotel, ready to transmit his first snaps of the blast.

Jerome has worked in many conflict areas in the Mideast, Africa and the Balkans, plus Northern Ireland, Haiti and Kashmir. Sherrlyn relates, "When I took my first photojournalism internship 10 years ago, I didn't consider myself a photographer at all, I just liked meeting the people who I photographed." She became a photojournalist as her second career.

Their dispatches this month reveal two perspectives on how to document "the pain of people who suffer and get to the truth."

AMY BOWERS
DISPATCHES EDITOR
amy@marash.tv

Back to the Contents Page