Alexandra Boulat was born in Paris, France, May 2, 1962. She was originally studying graphic design and art history at the Beaux Arts in Paris. She followed in the steps of her father, photographer Pierre Boulat, who worked for LIFE magazine for 25 years and her mother Annie Boulat, founder of Cosmos photo agency which she founded in 1979. Alexandra grew up surrounded with photography and in 1989 she joined Sipa agency and headed for the Balkans where she established herself as one of the very few women conflict photojournalists.
“I have studied arts, painting and art history in Paris and I was a painter for 10 years, but I always wanted to be a photographer. When I joined Sipa Press in 1989, I never thought I would end up doing war photography. But it came to me, at a road crossing in Ex-Yugoslavia. During spring 1991, I was travelling around all the republics of Yugoslavia to do a story on a country that was on the edge of a major breakdown. I was ending my journey when the first clashes erupted. After few weeks of wandering across the towns, the villages and the still peaceful Yugoslav country side, I knew better about the place, its people and their ethnic differences. Therefore, the first check point of Serb civilians in arms at the entrance of a Croatian village made me want to continue the story, even if it would turn dangerous and too impressing. Thus, for the following 9 years, I was going to witness one of the bloodiest wars in Europe, and accompany thousands of people to the cemeteries.” Alexandra Boulat
Boulat was represented by her mother’s agency Cosmos and then by Sipa Press for 10 years until 2000. Her news and feature stories were published in many international magazines, above all National Geographic Magazine, TIME, and Paris-Match. She has received many of the most prestigious international photography awards for her work. She won awards from; The Harry Chapin Media Awards 1994 – Besieged Sarajevo – A reportage on daily life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, published in the book ‘Material world’. Paris-Match Award 1998 – Violence in Kosovo. Perpignan, Visa d’Or pour l’Image, 1998 – Daly life and violence in Kosovo. USA Photo Magazine’s photographer of the year, 1998. Infinity Award, International Center of Photography, New York, 1999 – daily life and violence in Kosovo. The Overseas Press Club in 2003 for her coverage of Afghanistan, and was named Best Woman Photographer by the Bevento Oscars in Italy in 2006. Boulat covered news, conflicts and social issues as well as making extensive reportages on countries and people. Among her many varied assignments, she reported on the wars in former Yugoslavia from 1991 until 1999, including Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo; the fall of the Taliban, the Iraqi people living under the embargo in the 90s, and the invasion of Baghdad by the coalition in 2003.
Just two days before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, she joined half a dozen top photographers to launch the cooperative photo VII Agency together with James Nachtwey, Gary Knight, Ron Haviv, Christopher Morris, Antonin Kratochvil and John Stenmeyer. Their mission was to ‘produce an unflinching record of the injustices created and experienced by people’. Her Paris flat was its first headquarters. A year later she won the World Press Photo award for her photographs of Yves St Laurent’s last show. Forty years earlier her father had shot the fashion designer’s first show. A Time colleague who worked beside her in Afghanistan that year dubbed her ‘a Ninja with a Nikon’ because she drove herself relentlessly and had a knack of merging into the background whether she was rolling in the dust or scrambling up the rafters. She dressed in black or khaki, which enabled her to be stealthy in a room full of activity and she seemed to literally vanish into her work. She did not flinch from death and embraced the complexities of life with a sense of the absurd.
Boulat was no stranger to the battlefield, covering the Balkan conflicts, from powerful images of Vukovar, Croatia in 1991, horrors of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to photos of massacres and exodus of people in Kosovo from 1998 onwards. Always aware of the risk to her own life, she was driven to give voice to the unheard, to bear witness to the unseen and to somehow make sense of all the madness. She was a rare soul who could take in the chaos of war and somehow make it viewable for the rest of us. Alexandra Boulat has published two books: PARIS published by National Geographic Books in 2002 and Eclats De Guerre (Lights of War), ten years of conflict in former Yugoslavia, published by Les Syrtes Image in 2002. She also published stories in National Geographic magazine: Albanians: A People Undone, February 2000 and Eyewitness Kosovo, February 2000.
Alexandra Boulat diary | 4 November 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“All this in order to reinvent photojournalism in the cold and desolation.
One should love… I loved. I still love, and besides, I have friends…
It is 10 degrees colder than last week. The room is cold, there is no electricity. No heating. There is no water. I could spend a month photographing people with sacks full of wood, men pulling carts with water canisters. I could photograph every grenade strike on the ground, every gaping hole in buildings. Dogs rummaging through garbage cans, silhouettes of people who, illuminated by car headlights, pass by at night. A haze over more than deserted streets, over Sniper Alley.”
Alexandra Boulat diary | 5 November 1993 | Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
“I love photography and I love to observe. That’s all.
I’m not going to get upset. But there is a sensitive boundary that must not be crossed in this journalistic profession and a few sensitive points concerning this profession if it is to remain what determines it: testimony.
A journalist is a witness, she can also be a voyeur, she can influence people with her testimony, but she must not become a person of influence, otherwise she becomes a political figure. The mission of a journalist is very simple and it must not go beyond its limits. She’s a witness, and that’s it. She herself does not change anything.”
(the rest of the gallery from Sarajevo you can see here)
Alexandra Boulat was the architect of one of the most deliberate, focused and militant bodies of work on the victims – particularly women – of conflict and injustice of our time. She had an alluring persona, inherited a love and talent for photography and possessed a deep desire to find the human condition within conflict and war. Before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s government scrutinized foreign journalists carefully by monitoring all stories and photographs being transmitted out of the country. A lot of photographers were subsequently kicked out of Iraq because the government didn’t like the pictures they saw on the photographers’ digital cameras and laptop screens. Boulat, on the other hand, was shooting film—making it more difficult for the Iraqis to know what she was photographing. She knew this, was allowed to stay and took advantage of it by traveling all over Iraq.
During the last few years, she was working on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. She also photographed Yasser Arafat’s family life. Other large assignments include country stories on Indonesia and Albania, and a people story on the Berbers of Morocco. Portraits and stories of Women in the Middle East – Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank. It was her journey through Islam, fundamentalism, war, domestic violence, education and youth. “War victims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, hold own by revolutionary and religious institutions in Iran, few women are inclined to embrace Western influence. In each country they are strictly condemned by laws or by moral for trying to escape family code and drastic traditions. In this part of the world family and honor are to be first and only rule. Each woman who accepted my camera with grace or naivety or often with the approval of a men has her own story to tell. From refugee, pilgrim, suicide bomber, teenager to Oriental baby dolls they tell about their condition, their rituals, their habits, their angers and their joys.” Alexandra Boulat
As exciting and glamorous a companion as you could hope for while traveling down a deserted road toward a smoking horizon, in many respects Alexandra Boulat epitomised the image of the woman photojournalist. French, tall, straight-backed, graceful, striking; she never conducted herself with anything less than poise and style. Brave and funny, her legendary moods could be capricious and mercurial, but her sense of purpose was unwavering: “take picture” was her heavily-accented war cry and take pictures she did: brilliantly. She was only one person. But with her death in October, aged only 45, the gang suddenly seems very small indeed, reduced far more than ever imaginable by a single loss. Despite the fame that followed the recognition of her work she was curiously unaffected by the hubris of vanity suffered by so many of her peers. “Hoohoohoo,” she laughed to me, at herself, one afternoon in Kosovo on hearing the news of an award she had been given for one particular frame. “I don’t do much, me, but what I do, I do well.” Anthony Lloyd
“I love photography. I am dedicated to my work too and it’s been like this for the past 15 years. That is why I could get to the position I have reached, now working for the best magazines, on assignment on the best stories, giving me the possibilities to shoot the pictures I like, the way I like to shoot them. So, I know what it takes. It’s about everything. Your health, your fears and your sentimental life. Photography got to be first, anything that is not related to it has to be left behind, forgotten, abandoned. This commitment has been painful some time, but I have no regret.”
Alexandra Boulat
Photo by Nikola Šolić
The Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Association which was created in loving memory to promote the work of Pierre & Alexandra Boulat and encourage the work of photojournalists has created an award, supported by LaScam – société civile des auteurs multimedia – endowment of 8000 euros which will be given to a photojournalist. The award is presented to a professional photographer of any age, sex or nationality who wishes to cover a social, economic, political or cultural issue in a journalistic manner, on presentation of a dossier. The Award is given in order to allow the winner to produce a story that has never been told but that the photographer cannot find support for within the media. Entry is free and you can find more information on how to apply by visiting these websites where her work is on display too: www.viiphoto.com and on www.pierrealexandraboulat.com
ALEXANDRA BOULAT was born on 2 May 1962 in Paris, France.
She died on 5 October 2007 in Paris, France, following complications from a ruptured brain aneurysm in Ramallah, Palestine.
Cover photo by Emmanuel Ortiz
Special thanks to Annie Boulat
Thanks to VII Photo Agency, National Geographic & The Guardian
Translated by Mustafa Čorbo
Music used: ‘Debussy – Clair de Lune’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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