🔗 Share this article

The photographer Brian Harris, who passed away aged 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.

An International Career

He travelled across the globe as a freelance or a employee for Fleet Street publications, covering such events as the fall 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 war and four US election campaigns. He also created poetic landscapes of the rural areas around his home county of Essex home.

By his own calculation he took over two million photographs, averaging 100 a day, but he made that count several years ago. He continued posting archive and recent images each day on social media up to a few weeks before his death, and had been arranging to give a talk on his life and work.

Notable Assignments

Stories from a turbulent career featured an expenses-shredding premium flight in 1991 to attend 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 sea on Brighton beach were carried across multiple columns of a front page, and are regularly reproduced as a striking example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, took the title from an exasperated John Major striking him with a folded briefing paper.

Professional Milestones

He became the a major newspaper’s youngest ever staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and was based 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 strongest images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was assembled to launch a new newspaper. He played a key role in forming the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping set new standards for news photography and newspaper design, in dramatic images filling multiple pages. Among many awards, he was honoured as the What the Papers Say photographer of the year in 1990 for his work in eastern Europe recording the fall of communism.

He operated independently after being made redundant in 1999, and major projects thereafter included a year spent photographing cemeteries across the world in 2006 for the war memorial organisation, which resulted in an exhibition launched in London – where he gave a personal tour to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a moving book, Remembered.

Early Life and Beginnings

Harris was born in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later helped his son build a darkroom in the garage. In the 1950s, the family moved eastwards – and to a better area – to the Rise Park housing estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to Chase Cross secondary modern school, acquiring useful skills in woodwork and metal crafting, before departing at 16.

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

Colleagues and Legacy

Other photographers, often outpaced by him, recalled his work as astonishing. A colleague, who collaborated with him in the early days, called him “a superb and fearless photographer”, an influence to a cohort of junior colleagues. Tim Dawson, a union representative, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a online service with Nikki, whom he had initially encountered as a toddler in infant school, and they became inseparable partners through his final decades. After learning of his illness, they embarked on a road trip in Europe, sharing bright 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 demise, was to transfer his extensive collection of 55 years’ work to a long-term repository. Among his favourite archive images he commented on a very young Harris consuming generous servings of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a blessed life I’ve had – no regrets and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married twice, each union concluded with divorce.

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