March 14, 2001


 

If you only had read the last two issues of COLORS, you would be forgiven if you thought it was some sort of hip anthropology magazine. Or a LIFE magazine documenting the disenfranchised.

Last issue was beautiful photo essay of a refuge camp in Tanzania. This issue takes the same form and covers the Roma - the people more commonly known as Gypsies.

I knew already knew a little about the Roma - that they were a people grossly discriminated against and that they had little political clout to improve their lot.

That being said, reading this issue was the first that I had learned that there was a massive displacement of Roma from Kosavo by the very Albanian refugees that NATO had helped return to Kosavo after they were displaced by the Serbians.

I don't want to give you the wrong impression. This issue of COLORS is not as much political as it is a cultural visit to the secretive world of the Roma. It's a facinating and strange world at that.

Previous issues of COLORS would make use of stock photography and original works juxtaposed in such a way to make a political statement on a certain theme, like smoking or sports.

Now COLORS seems to actively seek out and document the world we don't normally see. "The rest of the world" is how they put it. It's been a change for the better, I think.


 
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