Paul Lowe, an award-winning British photojournalist who captured the horror of war during the fall of the former Yugoslavia in a career that spanned decades and continents, was killed in a stabbing near Los Angeles on Saturday. He was 60.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office filed one count of murder against Mr. Lowe’s son, Emir Abadzic Lowe, 19, for the death, in the San Gabriel Mountains, the county’s Sheriff’s Department said in a statement on Tuesday. The county’s medical examiner said Mr. Lowe had died from a stab wound in the neck.
Mr. Lowe’s work as a photojournalist encompassed several conflicts and major historical events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Russian invasion of Grozny in Chechnya. His best-known photographs emerged out of the siege of Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the longest sieges of a capital city in modern history.
His son had long struggled with his mental health and was hospitalized on multiple occasions for psychosis over the past year, said Amra Abadzic Lowe, Mr. Lowe’s wife of almost 30 years.
Their son took a trip to the United States that was supposed to last days, but he had not returned after more than two months. Mr. Lowe traveled to California to try to persuade him to come home with him.
“We were obviously very nervous about the whole situation,” Ms. Abadzic Lowe said.
Mr. Lowe and his son had been driving around the mountains in the Los Angeles area, she said, and had gotten out of their car to admire the views just before the incident occurred.
Ms. Abadzic Lowe said she had been in touch with her husband minutes before he was stabbed, and he had said their son seemed calm. But, she said, with such cases of severe mental illness, “unfortunately you don’t ever know what’s happening inside somebody’s brain.”
She added: “As a parent we felt that we could help him. We never would expect this kind of outcome.”
Their son was arrested after crashing the car while driving away, the Sheriff’s Department said.
Across his career, Mr. Lowe had images published in Time, Newsweek, Life and The Sunday Times Magazine, among other publications. During the siege of Sarajevo, he photographed the daily life of the city’s residents as it was being blockaded by the Yugoslav Army and the Bosnian Serb Army from 1992 to 1996.
“During the siege, I really tried to document the lived experience of the citizens of Sarajevo,” he told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in 2022. “Their resilience, their creativity, their courage, their humor and their energy in the face of the incredible aggression.”
Mr. Lowe worked in recent years as a scholar of the history and ethics of photography at the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts London.
Christian Paul Lowe was born in London on Nov. 6, 1963, and grew up in Liverpool. He graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy, according to his résumé. He earned a vocational degree in documentary photography in 1988 at the University of Wales, Newport, formerly the Gwent College of Higher Education.
He worked as a photojournalist in more than 80 countries from the 1980s to the 2000s. The first major story he covered was the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said in a 2019 video by the London College of Communication. He also covered Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the Romanian revolution and famine in Africa.
“What I was really interested in, as a photographer, was this sense of what happens to ordinary people in these extraordinary situations,” he said. “I experienced that, I photographed that, I documented that.”
Throughout the 1990s, he documented the Balkan wars and the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. He cataloged his photographs from that period in his book “Bosnians,” published in 2005.
For Mr. Lowe, years of working as a photojournalist raised questions about the ethics of documenting conflict and how journalists should interact with the people they cover, he said in the 2019 video. Those questions were at the center of his research in the next phase of his life.
After covering the Bosnian War, he joined the London College of Communication in 2003 as a lecturer in photojournalism. While in that academic post, he published books including “Behind the Camera” (2016), “1001 Photographs You Must See In Your Lifetime” (2017), “A Chronology of Photography” (2018) and “Photography Rules” (2020).
His books and lectures, many dealing with the history of photojournalism and the ethics of representing human suffering through images, often spoke of photography’s potential to help bear witness to atrocities.
“The camera is sort of a way of transporting you through time and place to a location that you couldn’t have been at physically,” he said in a 2018 keynote address in England.
Mr. Lowe for years divided his time between London and Sarajevo, where his wife is from, he told Telegrafi, a news website in Kosovo in 2022.
In addition to his wife and son Emir, Mr. Lowe is survived by another son, 17.
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