Photojournalist who covered the civil war in
Lebanon, the siege of Sarajevo, the fall of the
Berlin wall and the 2003 invasion of IraqThe photojournalist Tom Stoddart, who has died from
cancer aged 67, covered conflicts, catastrophes and social issues around the world for 40 years and was regarded by his peers as an outstanding practitioner.
I came to know Tom in the 1990s when we covered the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, often being in the same place at the same time. Although news photographers are commonly thought of as rivals, our camaraderie grew out of shared adversity and was cemented by our love for photography, especially the use of black and white reportage as a medium. Tom did not like colour photography and regularly quoted the Canadian photographer Ted Grant’s pithy remark: “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.”