🔗 Share this article

The photojournalist Brian Harris, who has died aged 73 from cancer, ended his schooling at 16 to work as a courier, and eventually became among the most esteemed UK photojournalists of his generation.

An International Professional Journey

He travelled across the globe as a freelance or a employee for Fleet Street publications, documenting major happenings including the fall of the Berlin Wall, drought and hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkans and throughout Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and four US election campaigns. He also created lyrical landscapes of the rural areas around his Essex home.

According to his estimates he shot more than two million images, taking an average of 100 a day, but he made that count some years back. He continued posting archive and recent images each day on online platforms until a few weeks before his passing, and had been planning to give a talk on his life and work.

Notable Assignments

Tales from a turbulent career included an costly business class flight in 1991 to reach the burial in India of the slain politician Rajiv Gandhi, where he fainted from sunstroke and pneumonia and was cooled down 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 eight columns of a leading page, and are often reprinted as a hideous example of staged photo hubris. His 2016 memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an irritated John Major hitting him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Career Milestones

He became the Times’ youngest ever staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and worked around the world for almost ten years, including reporting 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 became chief photographer as the team was assembled to create a new newspaper. He played a key role in forming the style of editorial photography that the paper became known for, helping set new standards for press images and newspaper design, in dramatic images covering multiple pages. Among numerous awards, he was honoured as the What the Papers Say photographer of the year in 1990 for his work in the former Eastern Bloc documenting 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 exhibition launched in London – where he gave a private viewing to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a emotional book, Remembered.

Background and Beginnings

Harris was born in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later helped his son construct a photo lab in the garage. In the 1950s, the family relocated eastwards – and up in the world – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to a local secondary modern school, acquiring practical skills in woodwork and metalwork, before leaving at 16.

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

Peers and Impact

Fellow photographers, often outpaced by him, remembered his work as remarkable. A colleague, who worked with him in the initial stages, called him “a great and fearless photographer”, an inspiration to a cohort of junior colleagues. Another associate, a union representative, said he “transformed the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris made contact through a online service with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had initially encountered as a toddler in primary school, and they became inseparable partners through his remaining years. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they embarked on a road trip in Europe, sharing sunny images of fine dining and quality drinks, and returning to significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a short time before his death, was to donate his extensive collection 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 remorse and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married twice, both marriages concluded with divorce.

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