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The photographer Brian Harris, who passed away at the age of 73 from cancer, ended his schooling at 16 to work as a courier, and eventually became among the most esteemed British photojournalists of his generation.

A Global Career

He journeyed across the globe as a freelance or a staffer for major British publications, documenting major happenings including the collapse of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkans and across Africa, the consequences of the Falklands conflict and several US presidential campaigns. He also created lyrical landscapes of the rural areas around his home county of Essex home.

According to his estimates he shot over two million photographs, taking an average of 100 a day, but he stated that figure several years ago. He kept sharing archive and recent images daily on online platforms up to a few weeks before his death, and had been arranging to deliver a lecture on his life and work.

Notable Projects

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an expenses-shredding business class flight in 1991 to reach the burial in India of the assassinated leader Rajiv Gandhi, where he collapsed from heatstroke and pneumonia and was treated with ice that had been employed to cool the body.

His 1983’s images of the at that time Labour party leader Neil Kinnock with his wife, Glenys, falling into the tide on Brighton beach were published across multiple columns of a leading page, and are regularly reproduced as a hideous example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, took the title from an exasperated John Major hitting him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Career Highlights

He became the Times’ most youthful staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and worked around the world for almost ten years, including coverage of the end of the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he considered censorship of his most powerful images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was assembled to create a new newspaper. He played a key role in forming the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for news photography and broadsheet design, in striking images filling multiple pages. Among numerous awards, he was named the What the Papers Say photographer of the year in 1990 for his work in the former Eastern Bloc recording the collapse of communism.

He worked as a freelance after being let go in 1999, and significant projects after that included a year spent capturing cemeteries across the world in 2006 for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which resulted in an display launched in London – where he gave a personal tour to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a moving book, Remembered.

Background and Beginnings

Harris was born in east London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later assisted him construct a photo lab in the garage. In the mid 1950s, the family moved eastwards – and to a better area – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to a local secondary modern school, learning practical skills in woodwork and metalwork, before departing at 16.

At a Fleet Street photo agency, he quickly advanced from delivery boy to photographer, and launched his professional career at east London local papers before progressing to national publications.

Colleagues and Legacy

Fellow photographers, often scooped by him, remembered his work as remarkable. A colleague, who worked with him in the early days, called him “a superb and fearless photographer”, an inspiration to a generation of junior colleagues. Another associate, a union representative, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ last golden age”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a online service with Nikki, whom he had first met as a three-year-old in primary school, and they became inseparable partners through his remaining years. After learning of his illness, they embarked on a road trip in Europe, sharing sunny images of good meals and quality drinks, and returning to significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His final project, completed a short time before his death, was to donate his extensive collection of five decades of work to a permanent home. Among his favourite archive images he reflected on a very young Harris consuming large glasses of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a fortunate life I’ve had – no remorse and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married twice, both marriages ended in divorce.

He is survived by Nikki, his son Jacob, from his second marriage, Nikki’s daughter, Holly, and by his sister, Jan.