Courage, dignity portrayed in face of war
Tom Stoddart, who has died aged 67, was one of the world’s top globe-trotting news photojournalists, who covered conflicts and disasters from Lebanon to Iraq to Bosnia and captured some of the first images of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Deeply admired by his fellow photojournalists, Stoddart usually stuck to black-and-white images during a four-decade career in which he was a freelancer contributing to
The Times and Sunday Times, Time and Newsweek magazines, wire services and other publications around the world. He often quoted Canadian photographer Ted Grant as saying: ‘‘If you photograph in colour, you see the colour of their clothes, but if you photograph in black and white, you see the colour of their soul.’’
Through his lens, he portrayed the fury of war, the anguish of Aids patients, the hopefulness of suffering children and the silent shock of New Yorkers looking from the Staten Island ferry at the smoking void where the twin towers had just collapsed.
In the 1990s, Stoddart covered the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. He captured Lebanon’s ongoing conflicts in the 1980s and was one of the first on the scene of the Lockerbie disaster when Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into the Scottish village in 1988, killing 259 on board and 11 people on the ground.
But he focused on more than tragedy. Stoddart produced memorable photos of British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron and Tony Blair, and took one of the most iconic images of Lady Diana Spencer just before her engagement to Prince Charles was announced. The 19-year-old Diana had just stalled her Mini Metro car outside her flat in London when Stoddart caught her looking startled.
In August 1989, after returning to London from Berlin, he followed his ‘‘gut instinct’’ and went straight back to Berlin, walking into one of the biggest stories of the century: the fall of the Berlin Wall. He captured West Berliners hauling their East German compatriots up and over the wall, in the first dramatic steps toward Germany’s reunification.
Perhaps his most famous photo, taken in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1994, shows a chic woman in a long dress, black stockings, high heels, pearls and immaculate makeup, proudly holding her head high while walking past a wall of sandbags and an armed Bosnian soldier. She was defiantly going to work while Serbian forces across the river were pounding the city with artillery and sniper fire.
It became the cover of Stoddart’s 2020 book Extraordinary Women, with a foreword by actress and director Angelina Jolie, who hired him to photograph some of her humanitarian projects around the world. ‘‘All through my career, there are so many times that you notice whenever there’s a problem — whether it’s a famine, HIV/Aids or an earthquake — it’s always the women who turn and face the situation,’’ Stoddart told
Digital Camera magazine this year. ‘‘They feed their families first, and feed themselves last.’’
Soon after taking the photo of the Sarajevo woman, who he later learned was Meliha Varesanovic, Stoddart was sent flying over a wall outside the Bosnian parliament by the nearby explosion of a Serbian shell. The explosion left him with one leg shorter than the other and a titanium plate in his shoulder. He was back on the front lines within a year.
Unlike many photographers, Stoddart was careful under fire, calculating the odds and exit routes while sprinting across ‘‘Sniper Alley’’ in Sarajevo or driving to the airport.
He carried a card indicating his blood type. In 1981, his photos of baby seals being culled on orders of the Canadian government appeared around the world. He shot the images from the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, which was trying to stop the killings.
During the 1980s, Stoddart covered the fighting in Lebanon alongside
Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin, who lost an eye while covering the Sri Lankan civil war in 2001 and was killed by Syrian army fire in the city of Homs in 2012. She helped Stoddart smuggle his rolls of film out of Beirut by stuffing them in her bra and underwear.
‘‘I have seen many awful things, but I have also seen a lot of fantastic and beautiful things,’’ he said in 2019. ‘‘Humans do terrible things to each other, but there is also courage and humanity. That helps me keep it all in perspective . . . I’ve been very lucky in my career, with a ringside seat to history.’’
Stoddart was born in 1953, in Morpeth, northeast England. His father was a farmer on the estate of a local aristocrat, and his mother was a homemaker. After finishing school at 17, Stoddart wanted to become a reporter, but the local newspaper, the
Berwick Advertiser, only had an opening for an apprentice photographer. He moved to London in 1978, and soon picked up freelance work for the Sunday Times, which led to work for Time.
Survivors include his wife Ailsa Hall Stoddart, and a sister.