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The photojournalist B. Harris, who passed away at the age of 73 from cancer, ended his schooling at 16 to work as a courier, and eventually became one of the most respected UK documentary photographers of his era.

A Global Career

He travelled across the globe as a freelance or a staffer for Fleet Street titles, documenting major happenings including the fall of the Berlin Wall, drought and hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkans and across Africa, the consequences of the Falklands conflict and four US election campaigns. He also created lyrical scenic views of the countryside around his home county of Essex home.

According to his estimates he took more than two million photographs, taking an average of 100 a day, but he made that count several years ago. He continued posting historical and new images each day on social media up to a few weeks before his death, and had been planning to give a talk on his career and experiences.

Memorable Projects

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an costly business class flight in 1991 to attend the burial in India of the slain politician Rajiv Gandhi, where he fainted from heatstroke and pneumonia and was cooled down 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, toppling into the tide on Brighton beach were carried across multiple columns of a front 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 exasperated John Major hitting him with a folded briefing paper.

Professional Milestones

He became the Times’ youngest ever staff photographer when he joined the paper in 1976, at the age of 26, and was based around the world for almost ten years, including reporting of the end of the internal conflict in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he considered censorship of his most powerful images of starvation in Africa.

In 1986 Harris became chief photographer as the team was put together to launch a new newspaper. He played a key role in shaping the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping set new standards for press images and broadsheet design, in striking 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 recording the collapse of communism.

He worked as a freelance after being made redundant 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 resulted in an display launched in London – where he gave a personal tour to the Queen 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 eastwards – and up in the world – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to a local secondary modern school, acquiring useful skills in woodwork and metalwork, before departing at 16.

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

Peers and Impact

Other photographers, often outpaced by him, remembered his work as remarkable. A colleague, who collaborated with him in the early days, called him “a great and brave photographer”, an inspiration to a generation of junior colleagues. Another associate, a freelance organiser, said he “transformed the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ last golden age”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris made contact through a online service with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had initially encountered as a three-year-old in infant school, and they became close companions through his final decades. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they went on a driving tour in Europe, posting sunny images of fine dining and good wine, and revisiting significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His final project, completed a few weeks before his demise, was to donate his vast archive of five decades of work to a long-term repository. Among his favourite archive images he commented 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 wed twice, both marriages concluded with divorce.

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