🔗 Share this article

The photographer Brian Harris, who passed away aged 73 of cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and eventually became among the most esteemed UK photojournalists of his generation.

An International Professional Journey

He journeyed across the globe as a freelance or a employee for major British publications, covering major happenings including the collapse of the Berlin Wall, drought and hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkan region and across Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and several US election campaigns. Additionally, he produced lyrical scenic views of the rural areas around his Essex home.

By his own calculation he took more than two million photographs, taking an average of 100 a day, but he stated that figure some years back. He continued posting historical and recent images daily on online platforms up to a few weeks before his passing, and had been arranging to give a talk on his life and work.

Notable Projects

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an expenses-shredding premium flight in 1991 to attend the burial in India of the assassinated leader 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, toppling into the tide on Brighton beach were carried across multiple columns of a leading page, and are regularly reproduced as a hideous example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016 memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an irritated John Major hitting him with a folded briefing paper.

Professional Highlights

He became the Times’ most youthful staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and was based around the world for nearly a decade, including coverage of the end of the internal conflict in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He eventually resigned over what he considered censorship of his strongest images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was put together to launch a major newspaper. He played a key role in shaping the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for press images and broadsheet design, in dramatic images filling front and back 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 documenting the fall of communism.

He worked as a freelance after being made redundant in 1999, and significant 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 private viewing to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a moving book, Remembered.

Early Life and Beginnings

Harris was raised in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an electrician who later helped his son build a darkroom in the garage. In the 1950s, the family relocated eastwards – and up in the world – to the Rise Park housing estate in Romford, Essex. Brian attended a local secondary modern school, acquiring practical skills in woodwork and metal crafting, before departing at 16.

At a central London agency, he quickly advanced from delivery boy to photographer, and began his working life at eastern London local papers before moving on to major publications.

Peers and Legacy

Other photographers, often scooped by him, recalled his work as astonishing. Nick Turpin, who worked with him in the early days, called him “a superb and brave photographer”, an inspiration to a cohort of young colleagues. Another associate, a freelance organiser, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ last golden age”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris made contact through a online service with Nikki, whom he had first met as a toddler in primary school, and they became inseparable partners through his final decades. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they embarked on a road trip in Europe, posting bright images of good meals and quality drinks, and returning to important sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His final project, finished a short time before his demise, was to transfer his vast archive of five decades of work to a long-term repository. Among his preferred historical photos he reflected on a very young Harris consuming generous servings of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a fortunate life I’ve had – no remorse and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was wed twice, both marriages ended in divorce.

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