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The photographer Brian Harris, who has died at the age of 73 of cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and eventually became one of the most respected British documentary photographers of his generation.

An International Career

He journeyed the world as a independent or a employee for Fleet Street 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 consequences of the Falklands conflict and several US presidential campaigns. He also created lyrical landscapes of the countryside around his home county of Essex home.

By his own calculation he took over two million photographs, averaging 100 a day, but he made that count several years ago. He kept sharing historical and recent images daily on social media up to a few weeks before his death, and had been arranging to deliver a lecture on his career and experiences.

Notable Assignments

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an costly business class flight in 1991 to attend the burial in India of the assassinated leader Rajiv Gandhi, where he fainted from heatstroke and pneumonia and was cooled down with ice that had been used to preserve the body.

His 1983 images of the then Labour party leader Neil Kinnock with his wife, Glenys, falling into the tide on Brighton beach were carried across eight columns of a front page, and are regularly reproduced as a striking example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016 memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an exasperated John Major striking him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Professional Highlights

He became the Times’ most youthful staff photographer when he joined the paper in 1976, at the age of 26, and was based around the world for nearly a decade, including coverage of the end of the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He eventually resigned over what he considered 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 new newspaper. He was instrumental in shaping the style of editorial photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for press images and broadsheet design, in striking images filling 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 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 display launched in London – where he gave a private viewing to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a emotional book, Remembered.

Early Life and Beginnings

Harris was born in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an electrician who later assisted him build a darkroom in the garage. In the mid 1950s, the family moved farther east – and to a better area – to the Rise Park housing estate in Romford, Essex. Brian went to Chase Cross secondary modern school, learning practical skills in woodwork and metal crafting, before departing at 16.

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

Peers and Legacy

Fellow photographers, often outpaced by him, remembered his work as astonishing. Nick Turpin, who collaborated with him in the initial stages, called him “a superb and fearless photographer”, an inspiration to a cohort of junior colleagues. Tim Dawson, a union representative, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris made contact through a website with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had first met 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 road trip in Europe, sharing bright images of good meals and good wine, and revisiting significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a short time before his demise, was to transfer his vast archive of five decades of work to a permanent home. Among his favourite historical photos he commented on a youthful Harris consuming 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, each union ended in divorce.

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