Award Winning Photojournalist
When Tom Stoddart applied for a job on his local newspaper, the Berwick Advertiser, in the north east of England he wanted to be a reporter. Fortunately for photography, there was no writing vacancy, only one for a trainee photographer. Tom, who was just 17, took the job and discovered life with a camera was far more exciting that one in an office behind a typewriter. It was the start of an extraordinary career spanning five decades that took him across the world.
In 1978, he moved to London and began working as a freelance in Fleet Street, the then world renowned centre of the British national newspaper industry and spent several years covering stories for the Sunday Times.
His commissions saw him present to record history being made: in 1982 he was in Beirut when Israeli forces bombed Yasser Arafat’s PLO base; that same year also found Tom aboard the Greenpeace ship, the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ in the Gulf of St Laurence in Canada where the environmentalists attempted to stop the Canadians culling baby seals.
In April 1987, Tom and the late Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin travelled to war-torn Lebanon in search of the Church of England envoy Terry Waite, who had been kidnapped. They did not find him but bribed a Shia militia commander to allow them into the besieged Palestinian refugee camp at Borj el-Barajneh, where a British doctor Pauline Cutting and her assistant nurse Susan Wighton were running a makeshift hospital. In the 24 hours they were allowed to remain in the camp, Tom shot 20 rolls of film that included a picture that made the front page of the Sunday Times, three pages inside and headlines all over the world leading to the liberation of the camp.
His images from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Romanian Revolution, the moment Nelson Mandela became South African president,Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, Palestine, Sri Lanka and other global hotspots spoke of his courage and the suffering of those in intolerable situations and conditions.
In the 1990s, Tom worked extensively in Bosnia to document the civil war in what was then Yugoslavia. It was in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, Tom and fellow photojournalist Keith Bernstein were heading back to the Holiday Inn when it became clear they were not safe. Tom was injured running back to the underground car park resulting in a shattered ankle and a titanium shoulder.
It took a year for Tom to recover from a serious shoulder injury, after which he threw himself back into work with a powerful feature on the aftermath of the floods in Mississippi and an award-winning photo-essay on the harsh regime for the training of young Olympic gymnasts in China.
December 1993 saw Tom back in besieged Sarajevo to report on the increasingly desperate conditions for residents during a freezing winter during which they were forced to burn their furniture and cut down all the city’s trees for wood to keep warm. He returned many times to Bosnia until the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the conflict in 1995 then again in 2012 for the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo that lasted almost four years that cost the lives of hundreds of Bosnians, including 521 children.
“As a photojournalist, I tend to gravitate towards interesting world events. After watching the TV pictures early on in the siege, I decided I had to go to Sarajevo to document what was happening. I arrived in the city in July 1991 and was immediately struck by how close it was to London, and other capitals in Europe,” he said later.
In a career punctuated with awards, not all his work was in war zones, catastrophes or crises. He photographed royals, prime ministers, world leaders and celebrities alike with charm and a touch of good humour delivered in a soft Geordie accent.
In 1997, the British Labour leader Tony Blair gave Tom exclusive access to follow him and document his three month election campaign that ended when Labour swept to victory after 18 years of a Conservative government.
His subsequent work documenting the terrible HIV/AIDS pandemic blighting sub-Saharan Africa has been extensively exhibited and published and won the Pictures of the Year (POY) ‘World Understanding Award’ in 2003. In the same year his documentation of British Royal Marines in combat during the invasion of Iraq was awarded the Larry Burrows Award for Exceptional Photography by the Eddie Adams Workshop. His retrospective outdoor exhibition, iWITNESS, was visited by 250,000 people and the accompanying book was honoured as the best photography book published in 2004 by the POY judging panel.
During 2008 he was commissioned by the European agriculture agencies COPA-COGECA in Brussels to document the work of farmers throughout all 27 countries of the European Union.
Always in relentless pursuit of the elusive photograph to capture the moment and make a front page, he would later use the proceeds from highly paid advertising assignments to work for free for humanitarian organisations highlighting their campaigns usually involving children. Tom worked closely with charities and NGO's including Medecins Sans Frontieres, Oxfam, Christian Aid, Care International and Sightsavers.
In 2012 his 'Perspectives' retrospective outdoor exhibition at London's South Bank during the Olympic Games attracted 225,000 visitors and in 2020 ACC Arts Books published Tom’s book ‘Extraordinary Women’; a photographic collection that salutes the strength and resilience of women through times of war, poverty and hardship with a foreword written by Angelina Jolie. Images from the book were screened at Visa Pour L’image, the world’s biggest international festival of photojournalism at Perpignan, France. The book includes War on Women, an essay by Marie Colvin.
On news assignments, Tom preferred to work in black and white citing the Canadian photographer Ted Grant: “When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls!”.
Tom Stoddart will remain as one of the world’s most respected photojournalists; an archive of his pictures is stored with Getty Images and his family will continue working to keep the legacy of his powerful images in the public eye for generations to come.
Awards
1991 Nikon Photographer of the Year
1992 Nikon Photographer of the Year
1992 World Press Awards – honourable mention
1993 Ilford Feature Photographer of the Year
1994 Visa D’Or, Perpignan
1995 World Press Awards
1994-5 United Nations Environmental photographic competition
1995 Visa D’Or, Perpignan. Sarajevo mother and child
1995 China Through Foreign Eyes
1996 POY. Oscar Barnack Award, runner up
1997 Care International award for humanitarian photography
1998 POY. Canon Photo Essay Award
1998 Nikon Press Awards
2001 Hasselblad Foundation bursary for AIDS in Africa project
2001 World Press Awards – 2nd Prize.
2001 POY
2002 POY
2002 Nikon Press Awards. Feature photographer of the year
2003 POY. World Understanding Award
2003 Larry Burrows award - Eddie Adams Workshop for outstanding photojournalism
2005 POY. IWITNESS – Best photography book published in 2004
2006 Awarded Honorary Fellowship by Royal Photographic Society
2019 Lifetime Acheivement Award from the UK Picture Editors Guild
2020 Exceptional Achievement Award at the Amateur Photography Awards
