Pro in focus

Tom Stoddart is widely regarded as one of the world’s best photojournalists, and has a new book of his images of women taken around the world. Steve Fairclough finds out more…

With a career spanning 50 years, the award-winning photojournalist Tom Stoddart is currently taking a comparative career break at his home in the north-east of England, mainly due to England’s rigid Covid lockdown regulations. However, with his latest book, his work is still very much in the public eye. Extraordinary Women: Images of Courage, Endurance and Defiance features over 200 images of the women he has encountered and photographed since the mid-1980s.

Stoddart has often come across women in conflict situations, in the midst of famines or natural disasters. “All through my career, there are so many times that you notice whenever there’s a problem – whether it’s a famine, HIV/Aids or an earthquake – it’s always the women who turn and face the situation,” he says. “They feed their families first, and feed themselves last. Over the years, it’s been something I’ve had a lot of respect for.

“When I started to think about this, I looked at a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘A woman is like a teabag – you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.’ That just about sums up about the role of women in adversity.”

It’s fitting that the word ‘extraordinary’ is in the book’s title: it is an extraordinary body of photographic work, all shot in black and white. Significantly, it features Stoddart’s iconic image of Meliha Varešanovic on the cover –a defiant, proud woman in the midst of the siege of Sarajevo – and also includes a foreword by actress and film-maker Angelina Jolie. Jolie first discovered Stoddart‘s work in 2011, when her production team gave her a print of the photograph of Meliha, after they had wrapped the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, to remind Jolie of the city in which she had directed her first feature film. Since then, Stoddart has worked on several humanitarian projects with Jolie.