Extraordinary Women

Typical war zone coverage has two focuses: the fighters, predominantly young men; and the victims – everyone else. This book calls this familiar narrative into question. Without glamorising or sanitising the harsh realities of our world, it presents the endurance and iron will of women in situations of war, poverty and hardship.

Throughout his career, award-winning photographer Tom Stoddart has shown us the remarkable resilience of all sorts of people from across the world. In Extraordinary Women, he focuses on the female perspective.

His photojournalistic approach travels through the recent decades, with images displaying inner strength and freedom, the working lives of everyday women and the front line of war. Whether the setting is the Balkans, Sudan, Mozambique, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Albania, Turkey, China, America or Ireland, each photo serves as a testament to the agency and strength of those who are so often portrayed as vulnerable and helpless.

Tom Stoddart has built a reputation for compelling work, and this collection is especially remarkable for its uncompromising celebration of humanity, courage and dignity.

TOM STODDART

A PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION THAT SALUTES THE RESILIENCE AND COURAGE OF WOMEN THROUGH TIMES OF WAR, POVERTY AND HARDSHIP

TOM STODDART

ISBN: 978-1-78884-098-9

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£35.00/$45.00

www.accartbooks.com

FINEART ARCHIVES PUBLISHING CREATIVE

FOREWORD BY ANGELINA JOLIE

Dignity and Defiance Art affects us. Images can be burned into our minds, and change the way we think. They can help us remember history, or empathize with people across the world we have never met.

For me, one of those moments was the woman walking in Sarajevo, Meliha VareĹĄanovicĚ . In a single image, I felt the country and the moment: a people I would come to know and love and above all respect.

That elegant proud woman, that image, made me understand dignity and defiance in a way that I had not understood it before: that the fight is from within. There is the man with the gun in uniform, and the woman with her life force and refusal to cower and break.

The photographer who recognized the moment, and made sure to capture it and help us see it, was Tom Stoddart. I later met him and watched him work. Leaning in. Working and fighting to get the best shot. Never settling. Searching. His images have been burned into my mind, and the minds and memories of many others. I am grateful for the focus on the women in this book. Grateful to be able to open the pages and travel to meet them and feel closer to their lives. I hope you feel the same.

Angelina

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A teenage girl and Bosnian fighter with an AK-47 flirt on a Sarajevo street corner during a break in shelling, July 1992.

A young girl stares silently through a shattered window, August 1992, as the first United Nations convoy in four months reaches Dobrinja, a neighbourhood of Sarajevo that eight years earlier housed athletes for the 1984 Winter Olympics.

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67-year-old Antonia Arapovic hugs her neighbour’s child in the darkness of an underground cellar in Sarajevo during a heavy mortar bombardment; as well as snipers’ bullets, Sarajevans faced daily shelling with 3,777 mortar and artillery shells raining down on a single day in July 1993.

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With silent dignity an elderly woman waits for aid to arrive at her stricken village near Anjar in the Kutch district of Gujarat.

A proud elderly woman and a daughter comforting her mother, both suffering from river blindness, Mali, May 1997. In parts of West and Central Africa “ghost villages� on fertile land close to water are common, abandoned by those fleeing the infection.

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Thirty-five-year-old Chipo Mapongo, August 2000, contracted HIV while working as a teacher in Harare and returned to her home in Glendale, northern Zimbabwe, to fight the disease with the help of her family.

A vibrant 14-year-old Zambian girl at home in her village near Chirundu border crossing, February 2003, where she worked as a prostitute entertaining truck drivers travelling the main road from the capital Lusaka to Zimbabwe.

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144

A West German girl leaps to reach the top of the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate to witness history being made on the morning of 10th November 1989.

The previous night, East Germany’s communist rulers had decreed that the gates along the 45km barrier, which had divided Berlin and prevented people leaving the East for nearly 30 years, be opened. Few dared believe it was true.

But by 11 p.m. on 9th November large crowds of East Germans, brimming with suppressed joy and anxiety, gathered at Checkpoint Charlie; and when the gates opened just before midnight, they streamed through into the outstretched arms of loved ones and strangers for their first taste of freedom since the wall went up in 1961.

The night’s dramatic events marked the end of the Cold War.

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An extraordinary young gymnast practices her leaps at Wuhan School of Sport, July 1993, where dozens of children with sporting prowess endured harsh training to enable them to become sporting champions.

In the 1950s, Mao Zedong decided sporting success was important to bring glory to China. Thousands of sports schools were established and every year scouts scour the country looking for young children with potential whose bodies are tested to see if they are likely to develop appropriately for a certain sport.

Once selected for elite schools, children rarely see their parents but know the Chinese authorities will reward their families if they excel.

Female students attending a computer and media exhibition in Tehran in 1996 dare to expose their hair and manicured nails in public.

Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the country’s mullahs imposed a mandatory dress code requiring all women to wear the hijab in public; the dress code became one of the strictest in the Muslim world but women have pushed against the harsh restrictions on their lives.

Since December 2017, women known as the “Girls of Revolution Street� have staged public protests by standing on boxes in busy streets waving their headscarves; the authorities have responded with arrests and prosecutions.

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Typical war zone coverage has two focuses: the fighters, predominantly young men; and the victims – everyone else. This book calls this familiar narrative into question. Without glamorising or sanitising the harsh realities of our world, it presents the endurance and iron will of women in situations of war, poverty and hardship.

Throughout his career, award-winning photographer Tom Stoddart has shown us the remarkable resilience of all sorts of people from across the world. In Extraordinary Women, he focuses on the female perspective.

His photojournalistic approach travels through the recent decades, with images displaying inner strength and freedom, the working lives of everyday women and the front line of war. Whether the setting is the Balkans, Sudan, Mozambique, South Africa, India, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Albania, Turkey, China, America or Ireland, each photo serves as a testament to the agency and strength of those who are so often portrayed as vulnerable and helpless.

Tom Stoddart has built a reputation for compelling work, and this collection is especially remarkable for its uncompromising celebration of humanity, courage and dignity.

TOM STODDART

A PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION THAT SALUTES THE RESILIENCE AND COURAGE OF WOMEN THROUGH TIMES OF WAR, POVERTY AND HARDSHIP

TOM STODDART

ISBN: 978-1-78884-098-9

ËxHSLHSIy840989zv&:%:&:+:+

£35.00/$45.00

www.accartbooks.com

FINEART ARCHIVES PUBLISHING CREATIVE

FOREWORD BY ANGELINA JOLIE