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The photographer B. Harris, who has died at the age of 73 from cancer, ended his schooling at 16 to become a messenger boy, and eventually became among the most esteemed UK documentary photographers of his era.

An International Career

He journeyed the world as a freelance or a staffer for major British titles, covering such events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, famine in Ethiopia and Sudan, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, battlefields in the Balkan region and throughout Africa, the aftermath of the Falklands conflict and several US election campaigns. He also created lyrical landscapes of the rural areas around his Essex home.

According to his estimates he shot over 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 passing, and had been arranging to deliver a lecture on his career and experiences.

Memorable Projects

Stories from a turbulent career featured an expenses-shredding 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 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, falling 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 hitting him with a rolled-up briefing paper.

Professional Milestones

He became 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 nearly a decade, including coverage of the end of the internal conflict in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He eventually resigned over what he saw as censorship of his strongest images of starvation in Africa.

In 1986 Harris was made head photographer as the team was assembled to create a new newspaper. He was instrumental in shaping the style of journalistic photography that the paper was famous for, helping raise the bar for news photography and newspaper 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 documenting the fall of communism.

He operated independently after being let go in 1999, and significant projects thereafter included a year spent photographing 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 emotional book, Remembered.

Early Life 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 moved farther east – and up in the world – to the Rise Park estate in Romford, Essex. Brian attended a local secondary modern school, acquiring useful skills in carpentry and metalwork, before leaving at 16.

At a Fleet Street photo agency, he rose rapidly from delivery boy to photographer, and began his working life at eastern London local papers before progressing to national publications.

Colleagues and Impact

Fellow photographers, often scooped by him, remembered his work as astonishing. Nick Turpin, who collaborated with him in the initial stages, called him “a great and brave photographer”, an influence to a cohort of junior colleagues. Another associate, a union representative, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ last golden age”.

Private World

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a online service with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had initially encountered as a toddler 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 sunny images of fine dining and good wine, and returning to significant sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, completed a short time before his demise, was to transfer his extensive collection of 55 years’ work to a permanent home. 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 remorse and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was married 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.