Brian Harris
There’s only one Brian Harris, and Topfoto is thrilled to announce that from now on, much of his most important and best work will be represented by us. You can see the first few images at topfoto.co.uk as we upload his work from The Independent newspaper, making it available from Topfoto alongside his own private collection spanning the 1970s onwards.
MADE THE YOUNGEST EVER STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
AT ONLY 25 YEARS OLD
Brian Harris joined the founding team of The Independent newspaper in 1986, a power move on their part to benefit from his stellar career at The Times, where he had begun by being made the youngest ever Staff Photographer at only 25 years old.
His brief at The Independent was to produce the kind of purposeful editorial photography for which the newspaper became famous. His 12 years on the “Indy” coincided with the start of the civil war in Yugoslavia, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, plus three US Presidential campaigns (1988, 1992 for Clinton, and 1996). But his sharp eye and very well-prepared mind also caught powerful moments in the daily round of normal politics.
And then there is the unpredictable magic mix of luck, skill, timing and fate - which is why his photograph of Putin in 10 Downing Street from 1991 has a visceral impact when we look at it today.
Powering Brian Harris is a mind that retains detail and has almost instant recall: the links between people, their histories, their careers, who they want to be seen with and more importantly, who they don’t. Reading the room correctly in a fraction of a second. These qualities have been honed to diamond-hard precision over decades of working to be in the right place, at the right time and the results are legendary.
OUR THANKS TO BRIAN HARRIS AND TO THE INDEPENDENT