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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 went on to become one of the most respected UK photojournalists of his generation.

A Global Career

He travelled across the globe as a independent 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 across Africa, the consequences of the Falklands war and several US election campaigns. He also created poetic landscapes of the countryside around his Essex home.

According to his estimates he shot over 2m images, taking an average of 100 a day, but he stated that figure some years back. He kept sharing historical and recent images each day on social media up to a few weeks before his passing, and had been arranging to give a talk on his career and experiences.

Memorable Assignments

Stories from a turbulent career featured an expenses-shredding 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 eight columns of a front page, and are often reprinted as a striking example of photo-opportunity hubris. His 2016’s memoir, ... And Then the Prime Minister Hit Me, took the title from an exasperated John Major striking him with a folded briefing paper.

Career Highlights

He was appointed as 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 reporting of the end of the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He later stepped down over what he considered editing of his most powerful images of famine in Africa.

In 1986 Harris became chief photographer as the team was assembled to create a new newspaper. He was instrumental in shaping the style of editorial photography that the paper became known for, helping raise the bar for press images and broadsheet design, in dramatic images covering 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 eastern Europe recording the collapse of communism.

He operated independently after being made redundant in 1999, and major 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 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh – and a emotional book, Remembered.

Early Life and Start

Harris was born in eastern London, to Dorothy and Leonard Harris, an technician who later helped his son 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 Chase Cross secondary modern school, acquiring practical skills in carpentry and metal crafting, before departing at 16.

At a Fleet Street photo agency, he rose rapidly from delivery boy to photographer, and launched his professional career at east London local papers before progressing to national publications.

Colleagues and Legacy

Other photographers, often scooped by him, remembered his work as astonishing. A colleague, who worked with him in the initial stages, called him “a great and fearless photographer”, an influence to a cohort of young colleagues. Tim Dawson, a union representative, said he “reimagined the possibilities of news photography during newspapers’ peak era”.

Personal Life

In 2001 Harris reconnected through a online service with Nikki Bertroya, whom he had initially encountered as a toddler in infant school, and they became close companions through his final decades. After learning of his illness, they embarked on a driving tour in Europe, posting bright images of good meals and quality drinks, and returning to important sites including Dresden and Ypres.

His last task, finished a short time before his death, was to donate his vast archive of five decades of work to a permanent home. Among his preferred archive images he reflected on a very young Harris drinking large glasses of wine with the actor Helen Mirren: “What a blessed life I’ve had – no regrets and no ‘Must Do’s’”.

He was wed twice, both marriages ended in divorce.

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