CRISIS THROUGH A CAMERA LENS Paul Lowe is an award-winning photographer; his photos have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and The
Independent. His work has taken him around the world, covering such events as
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s release and the breakup of Yugoslavia. “Photography, for a variety of reasons, was the thing I was really captured by,” says Paul Lowe, award-winning photographer and Course Director at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. “You don’t have to translate a photograph. I can take a photograph and somebody in Japan, in China, in London, or in Germany can engage with it without having to worry about written or spoken language.” Lowe hit the ground running as a photojournalist. Halfway through a history degree at Clare College, University of Cambridge, he rounded up friends to dabble in documentary filmmaking. Rather than shooting scenes in his hometown, they went right for the exotic – Nicaragua, 10 years after the Sandinista Revolution. “We made a 16mm film in which I was the cameraman, but I also shot a lot of still photographs,” says Lowe. “Making a film was a pretty complex process even for a straightforward documentary. The number of people who need to be involved is quite large and also, in film making, you have a
role but with photography it is always under your own control.” Following the history degree and excursion to Nicaragua, Lowe completed a two-year postgraduate course in documentary photography at the Newport School in South Wales, a school known for producing famous photographers – “the Newport Photographic Mafia”, as he calls it. He was able to have his photographs commissioned by newspapers, generally stand alones on page three. This evolved into shift work with the Sunday Telegraph. “It was during the student riots in the late 1980s, during the Thatcher era,” says Lowe. “I was sent out to cover the demonstrations and there was a fight between the protesters and the police. I got a good photo of the police standing in their riot gear outside the Houses of Parliament, fighting back the hoards of unwashed youth as it were, and it made the front page.” From here it was on to documenting more pivotal moments in history, such as Nelson Mandela’s release and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “[My editor] said ‘get the first plane out there’,” says Lowe. “I arrived in Berlin as the wall was falling. I got some great pictures of the East Germans coming over the wall for the first time, meeting the West Germans, and the wall being torn down.” He stayed in Europe for a few more weeks, covering current events in
20 | Eye Magazine Fourth Edition