🔗 Share this article

The photojournalist Brian Harris, who passed away at the age of 73 from cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and went on to become among the most esteemed UK photojournalists of his generation.

An International Career

He journeyed the world as a freelance or a staffer for major British publications, covering such events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, drought and hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, war zones in the Balkans and across Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and several US election campaigns. Additionally, he produced lyrical scenic views of the countryside around his home county of Essex home.

According to his estimates he took more than 2m photographs, averaging 100 a day, but he made that count some years back. He continued posting archive and new images each day on social media up to a short time before his death, and had been arranging to deliver a lecture on his life and work.

Notable Assignments

Tales from a turbulent career featured an expenses-shredding premium flight in 1991 to attend the funeral in India of the slain politician Rajiv Gandhi, where he fainted from heatstroke and pneumonia and was cooled down with ice that had been used to preserve the body.

His 1983 images of the then Labour party leader Neil Kinnock with his wife, Glenys, falling into the tide on Brighton beach were carried across multiple columns of a leading page, and are often reprinted as a hideous example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016 memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an exasperated John Major hitting him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Career Highlights

He was appointed as the a major newspaper’s most youthful staff photographer when he joined the paper in 1976, at the age of 26, and worked around the world for nearly a decade, including reporting of the end of the internal conflict in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he considered editing of his strongest images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was put together to launch a new newspaper. He was instrumental in forming the style of editorial photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for news photography and broadsheet design, in striking images covering multiple pages. Among many 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 thereafter included a year spent photographing cemeteries across the world in 2006 for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which led to an display launched in London – where he gave a personal tour to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a emotional book, Remembered.

Background and Start

Harris was born in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later helped his son construct a darkroom in the garage. In the mid 1950s, the family relocated farther east – and up in the world – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian attended a local secondary modern school, learning practical skills in carpentry and metalwork, before departing at 16.

At a Fleet Street agency, he quickly advanced from messenger boy to photographer, and began his working life at east London local papers before progressing to national publications.

Colleagues and Legacy

Other photographers, often outpaced by him, remembered his work as astonishing. A colleague, who worked with him in the initial stages, called him “a great and fearless photographer”, an inspiration to a generation of young colleagues. Tim Dawson, a freelance organiser, said he “transformed the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ last golden age”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a website with Nikki, whom he had initially encountered as a toddler in primary school, and they became inseparable partners through his final decades. After learning of his illness, they embarked on a driving tour in Europe, sharing sunny images of fine dining and quality drinks, and revisiting significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a short time before his demise, was to transfer his vast archive of 55 years’ work to a long-term repository. Among his favourite archive images he commented on a youthful Harris consuming large glasses of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a fortunate life I’ve had – no regrets and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married twice, each union concluded with divorce.

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