🔗 Share this article

The photojournalist B. Harris, who has died at the age of 73 from cancer, left school at 16 to become a messenger boy, and went on to become among the most esteemed British photojournalists of his generation.

A Global Professional Journey

He travelled across the globe as a freelance or a staffer for Fleet Street titles, documenting such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkan region and throughout Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and several US presidential campaigns. Additionally, he produced poetic landscapes of the countryside around his Essex home.

According to his estimates he took over two million images, taking an average of 100 a day, but he made that count some years back. He kept sharing historical and new images each day on social media until a short time before his death, and had been arranging to deliver a lecture on his life and work.

Memorable Projects

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an expenses-shredding premium flight in 1991 to reach the burial in India of the slain politician Rajiv Gandhi, where he collapsed from sunstroke and pneumonia and was treated with ice that had been used to preserve the body.

His 1983’s images of the then Labour party leader Neil Kinnock with his wife, Glenys, toppling into the sea on Brighton beach were carried across eight columns of a front page, and are often reprinted as a striking example of staged photo hubris. His 2016 memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an exasperated John Major striking 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 civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He eventually resigned over what he considered editing of his strongest images of starvation in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was put together to create a new newspaper. He was instrumental in forming the style of journalistic photography that the paper became known for, helping raise the bar for news photography 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 fall of communism.

He worked as a freelance after being let go 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 personal tour to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a moving book, Remembered.

Background and Start

Harris was raised in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later assisted him build a darkroom 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, acquiring useful skills in carpentry and metal crafting, before departing at 16.

At a central London photo agency, he rose rapidly from messenger boy to photographer, and began his working life at eastern London local papers before moving on to national publications.

Peers and Legacy

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 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’ last golden age”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a online service with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had first met as a three-year-old in primary school, and they became close companions through his final decades. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they embarked on a driving tour in Europe, sharing bright images of fine dining and quality drinks, and revisiting significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, finished a few weeks before his death, was to transfer his vast archive of five decades of work to a long-term repository. Among his preferred historical photos he commented on a very young 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 wed twice, each union concluded with divorce.

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