“You can show a war without showing a gun”, wrote the French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat soon after returning from a shattered Baghdad in 2003. For someone who was self-effacing about her work and her methodology, it was an uncharacteristically weighty remark, but it succinctly conveys an approach to photography that made her one of its brightest young stars.

Boulat forged her reputation in the Balkans, covering the destruction of Yugoslavia from the invasion of Slovenia in 1991 to the clashes in Kosovo in 1999. From almost the first, her photographs showed aspects of war that stripped it of any allure - a perfectly ordinary house, on fire - yet though they brought her recognition and work from newspapers, she grew dissatisfied that her images, and her presence, could not make a difference.

From 2000, therefore, she had made the courageous and rare choice to evolve as a photographer, backing away from high-impact and saleable news work to concentrate on longer, more involved photo-essays. These often featured women (to whom she had access that male colleagues did not), or victims of war, subjects that she thought allowed her to bring more humanity to her work.

Boulat also tried to show that there was more than one side to a story. When most journalists in Iraq were focusing on the repressive nature of Saddam's regime, she photographed the country's large and prosperous middle class, and its ease of access to Western culture.

Such contrariness was very much her, and fed her image as the mercurial Gallic glamour girl of the press corps. In 1995, as journalists waited for Nato troops to enter Tuzla, they were surprised to see a cerise Range Rover speed first over the newly erected pontoon bridge. Out stepped Boulat, dressed in fur hat, black boots and a winter jacket that would have passed muster in French Vogue. Such moments led her to be dubbed “Boulat-la”, but there were many who were thankful that she did not fit the stereotype of the hard-bitten woman war correspondent.

Indeed, it was her ability to maintain her femininity and its accompanying sensitivity that raised her images above the customary level of news photography. Certainly, she was never less than professional, and knew how to personalise a complex story and photograph it so that a magazine would want to publish it.

Yet she brought to her work too an uncommon sympathy and a marked individualism which, reinforced by her painter's training, make miniature masterpieces of her most memorable pictures: dark hands fluttering in celebration before the golden dome at Karbala; a row of bullets counterpointed by a paper tulip on a shelf in Quetta, Pakistan.

As her choice of subjects, notably the lives of women in the Islamic world, becomes better appreciated, she is likely to become regarded not just as one of the leading journalists of her generation, but also as one of its most important photographers.

Alexandra Boulat was born in Paris in 1962. Her father Pierre was a star photographer for Life magazine in the Fifties and Sixties, while her mother Annie founded the Cosmos photograph agency.

Although she knew early that she too wanted to be a photographer, and learnt as her father's assistant, he discouraged her from taking up the profession, thinking that it and family life were not compatible. Accordingly, Boulat studied fine art at the Beaux-Arts, Paris, and then for ten years worked as a painter. Characteristically, when she finally made the decision to become a photojournalist, she did not pack away her finished canvasses but hurled them out of her studio.

In 2001, two days before the attack on the World Trade Centre, Boulat and six other photographers founded a co-operative picture agency, VII. She remained one of its driving forces as it has moved towards becoming the Magnum of the digital age, and was admired and beloved by her colleagues for the honesty with which she stated her opinion - even if it was the opposite of what she had maintained six months before (her choices were often influenced by turning to I Ching) - and went against what everyone else in the room felt.

For VII she undertook assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and worked frequently as well on non-war stories for National Geographic. In 2002, she photographed Yves Saint-Laurent's last show; 40 years earlier, her father had shot his first. It brought her a World Press Photo award, one of many accolades she received. A selection of her work in Yugoslavia was published as Éclats de Guerre (2002).

Since 2005, Boulat had been based in the Gaza Strip, documenting the rise of Hamas and trying to take pictures which, in her words, were not redundant when the world was so tired of the Palestinian conflict. She had also found happiness with Issa Freij. In June, she suffered an aneurysm, and despite being transferred to a hospital in Paris did not recover consciousness.

Alexandra Boulat, photographer, was born on May 2, 1962. She died on October 5, 2007, aged 45