life: Over recent months, with the whole world...

Over recent months, with the whole world watching, rebellions erupted across the Middle East and North Africa. Regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere teetered — and, in some cases, fell. In the midst of it all, photographer John Moore was there — a journalist presented with the rare opportunity to chronicle not a single revolution, but one revolution after another in the span of mere weeks. An especially precise photographer, Moore captures images of chaos that often feel remarkably deliberate and intentional — even in clearly treacherous, fluid situations.

LIFE’s Director of Photography Simon Barnett, who has followed Moore’s breaking-news work for years, says that what strikes him about John’s pictures is that “he seems to have a sort of ‘auto-compose’ function in his brain that allows him to see and shoot calmly when all hell is exploding around him.”

Here, in a gallery featuring some of Moore’s best, most recent work from a region in profound flux, LIFE.com illuminates the challenges, the exhilaration, and the very real perils of capturing history on the fly.

Three Revolutions, One Photographer

John Moore is one of my favourite photographers. I first came across his photos while working as an online news editor and browsing images of Afghanistan on Getty’s web archive. There’s a power and simplicity to his photo-taking that really captures the essence of the moment he is in. Beauty in chaos, brutality and pain.

I was very fortunate to get the opportunity to have a chat with Moore when he was in Sydney in 2008 for the Reportage Festival. He was the only journalist who captured the assassination of former Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto. This slideshow show I put together features photos he took on that fateful day, with audio of him describing to me what happened.

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