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The photojournalist Brian Harris, who has died aged 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 era.

An International Career

He journeyed the world as a freelance or a employee for major British publications, covering major happenings including the collapse of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkans and across Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands war and several US presidential campaigns. Additionally, he produced lyrical landscapes of the rural areas around his home county of Essex home.

According to his estimates he took over 2m photographs, averaging 100 a day, but he stated that figure some years back. He kept sharing historical and recent images each day on online platforms up to a short time before his death, and had been planning to deliver a lecture on his career and experiences.

Memorable Projects

Tales from a rollercoaster career featured an costly premium flight in 1991 to reach the funeral in India of the assassinated leader 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 images of the at that time Labour party leader Neil Kinnock with his wife, Glenys, toppling into the sea on Brighton beach were published across eight columns of a leading page, and are regularly reproduced as a striking example of staged photo hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, was named after an exasperated John Major striking him with a folded briefing paper.

Career Highlights

He was appointed as the a major newspaper’s youngest ever staff photographer when he started there in 1976, at the age of 26, and worked 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 saw as editing of his strongest images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris became chief photographer as the team was assembled to launch a major 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 front and back 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 recording the fall of communism.

He worked as a freelance after being let go in 1999, and significant projects after that included a year spent capturing 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.

Background and Beginnings

Harris was born in east London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later assisted him construct a photo lab in the garage. In the 1950s, the family moved 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 leaving at 16.

At a central London photo agency, he quickly advanced from messenger boy to photographer, and began his professional career at eastern London local papers before progressing to major publications.

Peers and Impact

Fellow photographers, often scooped by him, remembered his work as astonishing. A colleague, who collaborated with him in the initial stages, described him as “a superb and fearless photographer”, an influence to a generation of junior colleagues. Tim Dawson, a freelance organiser, said he “transformed the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a website with Nikki, whom he had initially encountered as a three-year-old in infant school, and they became inseparable partners through his final decades. After receiving his terminal diagnosis, they went on a road trip in Europe, posting bright images of fine dining and good wine, and returning to important sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a short time before his demise, was to donate his vast archive of five decades of work to a long-term repository. Among his preferred archive images he commented on a very young Harris drinking generous servings of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a fortunate life I’ve had – no regrets and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was wed twice, both marriages concluded with divorce.

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