News Tributes Paid to Photojournalist Paul Lowe, Chronicler of Sarajevo’s Siege

Paul Lowe. Photo: Amra-Abadzic-Lowe

Tributes have been paid to Paul Lowe, a photojournalist who was renowned for his documentation of the siege of Sarajevo, who died in California on Saturday.

“Paul was a courageous and beloved comrade, and a deeply devoted father and husband. The loss is shocking and overwhelming, and our hearts go out to his wife and family,” the VII photojournalism agency said in a statement on Instagram.

Born in 1963, Lowe’s career as a photojournalist career spanned decades and continents, taking in major historical events from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian revolution to the release of Nelson Mandela, from famine crises in Africa to the destruction of the Chechen city of Grozny.

His powerful images were featured in prestigious publications like Time, Newsweek, the Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and The Independent.

He was best known in the former Yugoslavia for his evocative photographs of the siege of Sarajevo, where he first came to work not long after the start of the war in 1992.

“During the siege, I really tried to document the lived experience of the citizens of Sarajevo: their resilience, their creativity, their courage, their humour and their energy in the face of the incredible aggression that they faced,” he told BIRN in 2022.

Lowe went on to live between the UK and the Bosnian capital, and his book ‘Bosnians’, documenting the war and post-war situation in the country, was published in 2005.

‘Watch Out Sniper!’, an exhibition that he curated in 2021 at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, also explored the human stories of the siege by focusing on the area of Sarajevo known during wartime as Sniper Alley.

Lowe worked for three years with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network as a curator consultant and photographer for BIRN’s Reporting House exhibition and community spaces in Sarajevo and Pristina.

“We are deeply saddened to hear about this huge loss for our community. Paul’s work has made a significant impact on documenting the war in Bosnia to preserve history so future generations can understand the gravity of these events,” said BIRN’s regional director, Milka Domanovic.

“BIRN worked closely with Paul for the last couple of years to establish a permanent exhibition in Sarajevo on the wars in former Yugoslavia and the role of the media. He also helped BIRN Kosovo set up an exhibition in Pristina to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the Kosovo war,” Domanovic added.

She noted that Lowe spent years researching the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in order to find material for the exhibitions.

“He selflessly shared his knowledge and his invaluable photo archives with BIRN, and helped us to conceptualise the exhibition. We will always be grateful for all the support and long discussions to find new ways to tell those important stories,” she said.

As well as being a photojournalist, Lowe was a dedicated educator who was dedicated to inspiring a new generation of photographers. He was a reader in documentary photography and course leader of the master’s programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London.