Paul Lowe, Award-Winning British Photojournalist, Dies at 60

He was fatally stabbed outside Los Angeles, and his 19-year-old son was arrested. Mr. Lowe had earned acclaim for documenting the siege of Sarajevo and other conflicts.

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 on Saturday in a stabbing near Los Angeles. He was 60.

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department said in a statement on Tuesday that the county district attorney’s office filed one count of murder against Mr. Lowe’s 19-year-old son, Emir Abadzic Lowe, in the death, in the San Gabriel Mountains. The county 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 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 in modern history.

His son Emir had long struggled with his mental health and was hospitalized on multiple occasions for psychosis over the past year, Amra Abadzic Lowe, Mr. Lowe’s wife of almost 30 years, said in a phone interview.

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, she said. Mr. Lowe had 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 episode occurred.

Ms. Abadzic Lowe said that she had been in touch with her husband minutes before he was stabbed, and that he told her their son seemed calm. But, she said, in 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.”

Emir Abadzic Lowe was arrested after crashing the car while driving away, the sheriff’s department said.

Across Mr. Lowe’s career, his images were published in Time, Newsweek, Life and The Sunday Times Magazine of London, 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,” Mr. Lowe 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 at the London College of Communication at the University of the Arts London as a scholar of the history and ethics of photography. He was also a contributing photographer and educator at the VII Foundation, which trains visual journalists from communities that are underrepresented in the media.

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. 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 event he covered was the fall of the Berlin Wall, he said in a 2019 London College of Communication video. 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.”

In the 1990s, Mr. Lowe photographed the Balkan wars and the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. He cataloged his images from that period in the book “Bosnians,” published in 2005.

He met Ms. Abadzic Lowe in 1992, when she was a reporter for the Reuters news agency. They married in 1995.

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 scholarly research.

He joined the London College of Communication in 2003 as a lecturer and went on to publish several 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 of which dealt 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 at a conference in England.

Mr. Lowe for many years divided his time between London and Sarajevo, where Ms. Abadzic Lowe is from. He loved the city, she said, adding that journalists often come and go from conflict zones, but in Mr. Lowe’s case “he just kind of stayed.”

In addition to his wife and his son Emir, Mr. Lowe is survived by another son, who is 17.

Ms. Abadzic Lowe said her husband had been an avid runner, a cyclist and the kind of dancer people would gather around at parties and make space for on the dance floor. “We just couldn’t compete,” she said.

Ziyah Gafic, a friend and a colleague at the VII Foundation, said his own photography career had started because of Mr. Lowe.

Mr. Gafic, who is from Sarajevo, met Mr. Lowe in 1999 as a young photographer with little money. “He gave me 10 rolls of his film,” he said. Mr. Gafic went on to create award-winning photos from those rolls, launching his career.

The two men forged a friendship. But Mr. Gafic said that even before they met, Mr. Lowe’s pictures from the Russian invasion of Grozny in Chechnya had made a deep impression on him.

To this day, he said, “those pictures remain in my mind as classic, iconic photojournalism.”