As was the case for many of the journalists of his generation who covered the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the life and career of the award-winning photographer Paul Lowe was defined by the conflict.
In 1992 he travelled to Sarajevo to document the horror in a city besieged by Bosnian Serb forces whose population was cut off from the world, being pounded with artillery and picked off by snipers. He fell in love with the place, the people and his future wife, and never really left.
Lowe, who has died aged 60, sought to portray people reduced by war to what he called “a medieval state of existence … doing the things that make us human” in defiance of the 300 shells that struck the city on an average day, targeting schools, hospitals and queues for food and water.
Among his many photographs showing the resilience, resolve and courage of city residents from those years, is one in which a child plays with a ball next to an anti-tank trap – he would later select this as his best picture. In others, a woman weeps over a makeshift coffin strewn with flowers, and famished locals pick leaves and grass to eat.
Again like many journalists in the besieged Bosnian capital, Lowe was dismayed and frustrated at the general indifference in other European capitals to the conflict raging at the heart of the continent. “Many of us covering the siege of Sarajevo initially believed, perhaps naively, that telling the story loud enough, well enough and honestly enough would lead to condemnation and intervention from the international community,” he told the Guardian in 2022. “There was a sense of incredulity that this could be happening in a European capital city. I don’t think any of us would have thought the blockade would still be in place three years later.”
The Sarajevo siege lasted 1,425 days – the longest in modern history – and left more than 11,500 people, including over 1,600 children, dead. When it ended and the UN troops and media returned home, Lowe stayed to marry Amra Abadzic, a Bosnian working for the Reuters news agency.
After their marriage in 1995, he gave up war reporting, deeming it incompatible with raising a family. A thoughtful and considered man, he also questioned the role of journalists – particularly photographers – in situations of conflict and distress, recognising their value as chroniclers of history but troubled by whether their presence was positive or intrusive to those in distress.
Instead he turned to documenting Sarajevo’s return to peace and spent the following decades ensuring the trauma of his adopted home city would not be forgotten, through books, exhibitions and as a mentor to new generations of photojournalists. His book Bosnians, documenting the war and its aftermath, was published in 2005.
“Photography can be much more than a purely descriptive medium,” he told his students. “Photographs can be used as tools with which to think and to analyse. I knew the things I was photographing were going to become part of our historical narrative.”
Kenneth Morrison, who co-authored Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo (2021) with Lowe, told the news website Balkan Insight: “While many other photojournalists were focused on getting close to the frontlines, Paul meticulously documented the lives of ordinary people in the besieged city. His vast collection of photographs is not only a hugely important historical resource but a testament to how much he loved Sarajevo.”
Born in London, Paul was brought up by his mother, Barbara Lowe, first in the capital, then in Liverpool, where he attended St Edward’s college, founded by the Irish Christian Brothers, and later in Lancashire, where he was a pupil at Darwen Vale high school.
As a reward for winning a scholarship to read history at Cambridge University, his mother bought him a camera to record his student days. It was this, rather than graduating with a 2:2 degree in history and philosophy, that decided his future.
In the 1980s, Lowe reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian revolution, followed by the domino-like collapse of communism in Europe. He photographed the Somalia famine and genocide in Rwanda, the conflict in Chechnya and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, and won awards not just for the technical quality of his images but for their humanity. His work appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Sunday Times magazine, Time, Newsweek, Life and other international publications.
Bosnia would represent the pinnacle of his photographic career, but he was frustrated by “the fact that, despite all of our coverage of the atrocities taking place in Bosnia, the international community failed to intervene, and it took the massacre of 8,000 men and children in Srebrenica to force their hand. And then, to watch the same unfolding in Ukraine today.”
In recent years, Lowe was course director of the master’s programme in photojournalism and documentary photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, and a professor of conflict, peace and the image. He also contributed to the VII Foundation, which trains journalists from underrepresented communities.
Lowe and his family split their time between the UK and Bosnia, and he was a passionate runner and cyclist, participating in trail races and triathlons in both countries. He died from a stab wound to the neck while on a walking trail in the San Gabriel mountains in California. His son Emir has been charged with his murder.
Lowe is survived by Amra and their sons, Emir and Amil.
