'Tom Stoddart used to take pictures of me when I was young, pretty, and a pop star. It made me laugh.

Yesterday he made my girlfriend cry. She was looking at the prints from this book. It was odd for me. In one of his terrifying photographs Stoddart shows a living skeleton, too weak to walk, crawling, hand outstretched in despair, reaching after a passer-by clutching a plastic bag full of food. The black stretched skin of the crawling body, the saucer eyes, the attenuated starved arm, stretched in supplication against the pristine white shoes and flowing robes of the well-fed body gliding past unmoved, unseeing, viewed only from the waist down, so mirrored my own experience of cruelty, that for the first time in a long while, I saw again an image that made my gorge rise with that old, familiar, sick rage and shame.

The anguish of the Sarajevans reduced to the pain of the dismayed, bereft left behind.

The running shots in ‘sniper alley’, almost like a deadly parody of Philippe Halsman’s famed ‘jumping’ shots.

The bewildered boy and his anxious mother, the spot the deliberate mistake shot of the beautiful woman, almost like some 1950s fashion plate in her elegant heels, pearls and tight dress, so determinedly feminine beside the brute, clear masculinity of the (again) half-viewed camouflage of the soldier and his hard, pointed gun. In her person, the resolution to make order from chaos, normality from the insane, and above all, that beauty will be imperishable. And Keats was right: she and this photo prove his great revelation that Truth is indeed Beauty, and it really is all you need to know.

The cracked, lined, dignified face made ancient by life, in front of the home smashed by earthquake.

The skeletal boy in Sudan, hidden by the leafless thin stump, behind which he hides not his shame, but ours. How can a human disappear behind a twig?

Here is the photographer. He waits and gets the light in the eye, the secret insinuation in the cracked wall, the lifeless tree, the beauty and the beast, the purity of pain, the nakedness of what we are prepared to do - with and to each other - and ultimately how bizarrely, almost wantonly and recklessly, that when humanity appears most degraded, humans become most dignified.

I’m glad Tom took my picture once. Proud of it in fact.'

Sir Bob Geldof

From the book iWitness, by Tom Stoddart