EDITOR'S NOTE:

For February, we present two dispatches: David Holloway traveled to the Middle East with the Harlem Globetrotters and Ramin Rahimian covered the presidential election in Venezuela.

Holloway's memories of Iraq, in particular, were much better than most others'. For their military entertainment tour the group travelled on military transport and visited 12 bases, three in Iraq. His images show life on the road: reading or dozing while tied into the transport plane, and a player seemingly soaring through the sky with a basketball as troops watch.

Ramin Rahimian, who often works in color, decided to work in black & white for the electoral story. He wrote recently that for him black & white lends more of a timeless feeling to the work, which is what he wanted. When he uses color there is a consistent color range throughout the story that can create or contribute to an overriding mood to the piece. This is, I believe, a good philosophy because color, as Vietnam War photographer Philip Jones Griffiths said, can be the "biggest single hindrance to photojournalism…." Meaning that color can at times lure the photographer into thinking about formal color theory instead of the issue at hand.

Marianne Fulton
Dispatches Editor
fultonaustin@yahoo.com

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