The Independent’s former chief photographer, Brian Harris, has passed away aged 73 after a short battle with cancer.
He joined the paper in 1986 shortly after it was launched, having previously worked as a staff photographer at The Times, becoming a regular and well-known face on Fleet Street.
Over the course of his 55-year career, he covered key global events such as the end of the civil war in Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), famine in Ethiopia and the Sudan, and the aftermath of the Falklands War.
He travelled across Eastern Europe for 18 months documenting the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and covered four presidential campaigns in the United States.
As a result of his work, he won several awards including the prestigious ‘What the Papers Say’ Photographer of the Year award in 1990, and has had several solo exhibitions, including at the Barbican and at Photofusion Gallery.
He has also been the subject of three BBC documentary programmes, and he has contributed to various BBC radio broadcasts.
In 2006, he spent the majority of the year photographing the ‘Remembered’ project for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, with Mr Harris escorting the late Queen Elizabeth around the exhibition at Canada House.
Nick Turpin, a fellow former photographer at The Independent, said: “Extremely sad news, a great and fearless photographer, he astonished me with the things he would try and succeed at.
“He shot a vote in the House of Commons at night clean across the river Thames, he shot France from Kent getting both cliffs in the same shot. When I was 20 and working with him at The Independent, I had never seen shots like that. He also stood up for all our rights at the paper.
“He inspired a whole generation of young photographers at that time in the 90’s and very much beyond.”
Brian Harris’s archive and photographic legacy is held by The Independent and Topfoto.
