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

An International Career

He travelled across the globe as a independent or a employee for Fleet Street publications, covering major happenings including the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkans and throughout Africa, the consequences of the Falklands war and four US presidential campaigns. He also created poetic scenic views of the countryside around his Essex home.

By his own calculation he shot over two million images, averaging 100 a day, but he made that count several years ago. He kept sharing historical and new images each day on online platforms until a short time before his passing, and had been planning to deliver a lecture on his life and work.

Notable Projects

Stories from a turbulent career featured an expenses-shredding business class flight in 1991 to reach the burial in India of the slain politician Rajiv Gandhi, where he fainted from heatstroke and pneumonia and was treated with ice that had been employed to cool the body.

His 1983 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 hideous example of staged photo hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, took the title from an irritated John Major hitting him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Career Highlights

He became the Times’ youngest ever staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and was based around the world for nearly a decade, including reporting of the end of the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he saw as editing of his most powerful images of starvation in Africa.

In 1986 Harris became chief photographer as the team was put together to create a major newspaper. He was instrumental in shaping the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for news photography and broadsheet design, in striking images covering multiple pages. Among numerous awards, he was honoured as the industry-recognised photographer of the year in 1990 for his work in eastern Europe recording the collapse of communism.

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

Background and Beginnings

Harris was raised in east London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later assisted him construct a darkroom in the garage. In the 1950s, the family relocated farther east – and to a better area – to the Rise Park housing estate in Romford, Essex. Brian attended Chase Cross secondary modern school, acquiring practical skills in woodwork and metalwork, before departing at 16.

At a Fleet Street agency, he rose rapidly from messenger boy to photographer, and began his professional career at eastern London local papers before moving on to major publications.

Colleagues and Legacy

Other photographers, often scooped by him, remembered his work as astonishing. Nick Turpin, who worked with him in the initial stages, described him as “a great and brave photographer”, an influence to a generation of junior colleagues. Another associate, a freelance organiser, said he “transformed the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a website with Nikki, whom he had first met as a three-year-old in primary school, and they became close companions through his remaining years. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they embarked on a road trip in Europe, sharing bright images of good meals and quality drinks, and revisiting important 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 preferred historical photos he reflected on a very young Harris drinking large glasses of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a blessed life I’ve had – no remorse and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married twice, each union concluded with divorce.

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