Gianni Giansanti

Born: 1956 in Rome.

Died: 18 March, 2009, in Rome, aged 52.

GIANNI Giansanti was an internationally prominent photojournalist known for nearly three decades of images that captured Pope John Paul II on the bustling world stage and in contemplative private moments.

In essence, Giansanti was John Paul's unofficial official photographer, by all accounts one of the few outside photographers whom the Vatican routinely trusted. His photographs appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines around the world, many of the images distributed by the Sygma photo agency, for which Giansanti did much of his work. (The Vatican had the final word on which papal photos were released to the news media, Giansanti said in interviews.)

On 16 October, 1978, Giansanti was present in St Peter's Square when Karol Jozef Wojtyla, a Polish cardinal, was elected Pope. For the next 27 years, until John Paul's death in 2005, Giansanti followed him around the globe, accompanying him on scores of foreign trips; documenting his meetings with religious leaders, heads of state and the ordinary faithful; capturing him alone, kneeling in prayer in his private chapel; and photographing him in 1983 as he paid a visit of forgiveness to the prison cell of Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had tried to assassinate him two years before.

Giansanti became a master of the stolen moment, using a silent shutter and available light to chronicle the Pope as he moved through public and private spheres. Every one of the thousands of pictures of John Paul he took over the years was a candid shot: one does not tell the Pontiff to stand in such and such a place and say "cheese".

Gianni Giansanti, born in Rome in 1956, began working as a freelance photographer in 1977. His career was assured the next year, when he captured a dramatic photograph of the body of Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister who had been kidnapped, shot and left in the trunk of a car by members of the Red Brigades, a terrorist group. The image was seen around the world.

His many other photographs include images of Pope Benedict XVI, the writer Primo Levi, the pianist Maurizio Pollini, the fashion designer Valentino and a variety of world leaders, among them Mikhail Gorbachev and General Wojciech Jaruzelski. He also photographed the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 and the famine in Somalia in the early 1990s.

Giansanti had several books of photographs published, including John Paul II, Portrait of a Pontiff (1996), with text by Marco Tosatti, and Vanishing Africa (2004), translated by Richard Pierce.

Interviewers often asked Giansanti what made him return again and again to John Paul as a subject. Appearing on the American television news channel CNN in 1996, he answered the question in eloquent if not entirely grammatical English.

"I like and have a great respect for the Pontiff," Giansanti said. "I like in the Pope the light that he have in the eyes."

Giansanti is survived by his wife, Anna, and two children.