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The photographer B. Harris, who passed away aged 73 of cancer, ended his schooling at 16 to become a messenger boy, 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 publications, documenting such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, drought and hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, war zones in the Balkan region and throughout Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and four US presidential campaigns. Additionally, he produced poetic landscapes of the countryside around his home county of Essex home.

By his own calculation he took more than 2m images, averaging 100 a day, but he made that count some years back. He continued posting archive and new images each day on online platforms up to a short time before his passing, and had been arranging to give a talk on his career and experiences.

Memorable Assignments

Stories from a rollercoaster career featured an costly business class flight in 1991 to attend the funeral 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 leading page, and are often reprinted as a striking example of staged photo hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an irritated John Major striking him with a folded briefing paper.

Professional Milestones

He became the Times’ most youthful staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and worked around the world for nearly a decade, including coverage of the end of the internal conflict in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he saw as editing of his most powerful images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was put together to launch a new newspaper. He played a key role in shaping the style of editorial photography that the paper was famous for, helping set new standards for press images and newspaper design, in dramatic images covering multiple pages. Among many awards, he was honoured as the What the Papers Say photographer of the year in 1990 for his work in the former Eastern Bloc recording the collapse of communism.

He operated independently after being made redundant in 1999, and significant projects after that included a year spent photographing 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 Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a moving book, Remembered.

Background and Start

Harris was raised in east London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later assisted him build a photo lab in the garage. In the 1950s, the family relocated eastwards – and to a better area – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to Chase Cross secondary modern school, learning useful skills in carpentry and metalwork, before leaving at 16.

At a central London 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 Legacy

Other photographers, often outpaced by him, remembered his work as astonishing. A colleague, who collaborated with him in the initial stages, called him “a superb 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”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris made contact through a online service with Nikki, whom he had first met as a three-year-old in infant school, and they became close companions through his remaining years. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they went on a road trip in Europe, posting sunny images of good meals and quality drinks, and revisiting significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a few weeks before his death, was to transfer his vast archive of 55 years’ work to a long-term repository. Among his favourite archive images he commented on a youthful 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 remembered by Nikki, his son Jacob, from his second marriage, Nikki’s daughter, Holly, and by his sister, Jan.