Alexandra Boulat, at 45; photographed images of war

NEW YORK - Alexandra Boulat, an award-winning photographer known for a clear, descriptive style and a knack for making emotionally moving, often idiosyncratic images of people affected by war, died Friday in Paris. She was 45.

She died after suffering a brain aneurysm in June and falling into a coma from which she never emerged, her friend Gary Knight said.

Ms. Boulat's work appeared in many publications, including National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, and Paris-Match. For most of the 1990s, she photographed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Her picture of Kosovar women surrounding a flag-draped coffin was a runner-up in the Alfred Eisenstaedt Awards for Magazine Photography presented by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and she won many other awards for her work.

Before the Iraq war, she was in Baghdad for National Geographic and gave attention to the lives of affluent people at a time when most photographers were interested in showing only the misery of Iraqis. During the war she took pictures that told about death in different ways, like a body wrapped in a white sheet.

"You can show a war without showing a gun," she said in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. shortly after the United States invaded, "and that's interesting - in only one photograph."

She published two books, "Paris" and "Eclats de Guerre," both in 2002.

Ms. Boulat was born in Paris in 1962. Her father, Pierre, was a photographer for Life magazine for many years, and she began as his assistant. Her mother, Annie, founded the Cosmos photography agency, based in France. Ms. Boulat studied graphic art and art history and worked as a painter before turning to photojournalism in 1989, when she joined Sipa Press, a French photography agency.

In 2001 she helped found the VII Photo Agency, which dedicated itself to documenting conflict - environmental, social, and political. In addition to covering the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq, she reported on the fall of the Taliban. Occasionally, she ranged far afield from war: Her coverage of a Yves Saint Laurent fashion show won accolades.

For most of the last two years, she lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah. American Photo magazine in 2005 said that her photographs of Arab women "reveal cultures more diverse than many Americans imagine."

Ms. Boulat leaves her mother; her sister, Antoinette; and her partner, Issa Freij.