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Reuters

Politics

Yannis Behrakis, award-winning Reuters photographer, dies aged 58

Yannis Behrakis in Normandy, France, October 10, 2016. Enric Marti/Handout via Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - Yannis Behrakis, one of Reuters' most decorated and best-loved photographers, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 58.

After joining the news wire 30 years ago, Behrakis covered many of the most tumultuous events around the world, including conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya, a huge earthquake in Kashmir and the Egyptian uprising of 2011.

In the process, he won the respect of both peers and rivals for his skill and bravery. He also led a team to a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for coverage of the refugee crisis.

FILE PHOTO: Reuters Chief photographer Yannis Behrakis speaks at the "Iconic in an Instant? One Trillion Images" panel event hosted by Reuters and ICP at ICP in Manhattan, New York, U.S., December 5, 2016. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File photo

Colleagues who worked with him in the field said Reuters had lost a talented and committed journalist.

"It is about clearly telling the story in the most artistic way possible," veteran Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic said of Behrakis' style.

"You won't see anyone so dedicated and so focused and who sacrificed everything to get the most important picture."

FILE PHOTO: Yannis Behrakis takes a self portrait after surviving an ambush by Revolutionary United Front rebels in the jungle of Sierra Leone when Kurt Schork and Miguel Moreno were killed, May 2000. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

That dedication was striking. His friend and colleague of 30 years, senior producer Vassilis Triandafyllou, described him as a "hurricane" who worked all hours of the day and night, sometimes at considerable personal risk, to get the image he wanted.

When Behrakis wasn't absorbed in work, he was warm, funny and larger than life. He could also be fiery.

"One of the best news photographers of his generation, Yannis was passionate, vital and intense both in his work and life," said U.S. general news editor Dina Kyriakidou Contini.

Yannis Behrakis poses for a photograph near the village of Ras Ajdir, Tunisia, February 25, 2011. Lefteris Pitarakis/Handout via Reuters

"His pictures are iconic, some works of art in their own right. But it was his empathy that made him a great photojournalist."

What underpinned everything Behrakis did in his professional life was a determination to show the world what was happening in conflict zones and countries in crisis.

He recognized the power of an arresting image to capture people's attention and even change their behavior. That belief produced a body of work that will be remembered long after his passing.

FILE PHOTO: A protester wearing a gas mask walks beside a burning van during violent protests against austerity measures in Athens, Greece, June 28, 2011. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

"My mission is to tell you the story and then you decide what you want to do," he told a panel discussing Reuters Pulitzer Prize-winning photo series on the European migrant crisis.

"My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: 'I didn't know'."

FILE PHOTO: Reuters Senior Editor Yannis Behrakis makes a speech at the Estoril Conferences - Global Challenges, Local Answers in Estoril, Portugal, May 30, 2017. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/File photo

"UNDER FIRE"

Behrakis was born in Athens in 1960.

He came across a Time-Life photography book as a young man, which prompted him to enroll in a private photography course. His love affair with the trade had begun.

FILE PHOTO: Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Yannis Behrakis stands for a portrait during an exhibit at the Visa pour l'Image photo festival in Perpignan, France, August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Adrees Latif/File photo

He worked in a photographic studio in the mid-1980s, but found the atmosphere stifling.

It was a 1983 movie, "Under Fire", about a group of reporters working in Nicaragua in the days leading to the 1979 revolution, that inspired him to take up journalism.

He started at Reuters in Athens as a freelancer in 1987, and in January, 1989, was sent on his first foreign assignment to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya.

FILE PHOTO: Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork (L) was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone on May 24 that also killed a Spanish journalist and four Sierra Leone Army soldiers. Schork distinguished himself as a journalist with his graphic coverage from the Balkans over the past decade. Two other Reuters journalists were wounded, including photographer Yannis Behrakis (R). Schork, 53, and Behrakis are shown in this April 27, 2000 photo at the Overseas Press Club (OPC) dinner in New York. Behrakis won an OPC award for his coverage of Kosovo, and he dedicated his award to Kurt Schork.

He quickly displayed a knack for being in the right place at the right time.

When Gaddafi visited a hotel where journalists had been cooped up for several days, a scrum of reporters crowded around the Libyan leader to get pictures and soundbites.

"I somehow managed to sneak next to him and get some wide-angle shots," Behrakis wrote. "The next day my picture was all over the front pages of papers around the world."

FILE PHOTO: A woman from an African Islamic country (in white) stands among Iranian women during the national anthem of Iran at the opening session of the 8th Islamic Conference Summit in Tehran's new conference building on December 9. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

CONFLICTS AND DANGER

For the next three decades, Behrakis was regularly on the road covering violence and upheaval across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

FILE PHOTO: Hassan Mekki, a 32-year-old Sudanese migrant, shows scars on his back in Athens, Greece, December 5, 2012. Mekki, who fled conflict in his country in hope of a better life in Europe, said that on August 2012, about five months after he illegally entered Greece, he and a friend from Mauritania were walking in Athens when black-shirted men on motorcycles holding Greek flags came up and knocked him half-conscious with a blow to the head. When he regained consciousness, he was covered in blood. Only later would he realise that his attackers, which he says were likely tied to the far-right Golden Dawn party, had left large gashes resembling an "X" across his back. "I don't have the right papers, so I can't go anywhere to ask for help," Mekki said. "I can't sleep. I'm scared, maybe they will follow me and my life is in danger now." REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

The pictures he produced won awards and admiration among the tight-knit community of war correspondents, who noted his rare ability to find beauty amid chaos and for his courage to be at the heart of the action.

The images https://reut.rs/2IIte65 captured the terror of battle, fear, death, love, intimidation, starvation, homelessness, anger, despair and courage.

FILE PHOTO: An ethnic Albanian villager looks through a bullet hole in a bus window in the village of Lapusnik 20 km south-west of Kosovo's capital Pristina, May 11, 1998. The bus was destroyed during fierce fighting between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian separatists. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

One photograph from the wars in former Yugoslavia, taken in 1998, shows an ethnic Albanian man lowering the body of a two-year-old boy who had been killed in the fighting into a tiny coffin.

Behrakis took the picture from a high position and used a slow speed/zoom technique to create a dizzying sense of movement.

FILE PHOTO: Ethnic Albanian Fluter Pllana, 18, cries in front of the burning house of her uncle after Serbian police and troops set fire to the house after encircling and shelling the village of Stitarica, 30km northeast of the regional capital Pristina, February 22, 1999. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

"The picture was very strong and the body of the boy almost floating in the air," he said of the image. "It almost looked like his spirit was leaving his body for the heavens."

In 2000, while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone, Behrakis was traveling in a convoy with Reuters colleagues Kurt Schork and Mark Chisholm, and AP cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno, when it was ambushed by gunmen, believed to be rebels.

Schork, one of Behrakis' closest friends, was hit and died instantly, and Moreno was also killed. Behrakis and Chisholm escaped.

FILE PHOTO:A member of the Ukrainian synchronised swimming team performs its free routine during an Olympic Games qualification tournament at the Olympic Aquatic Centre of the Athens Olympic Sports Complex (OAKA) April 17, 2004. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

Both survived the attack by crawling into the undergrowth beside the road and hiding in the jungle for hours until the gunmen disappeared.

Behrakis took a photo of himself just after the ordeal. The picture shows him staring up at the sky, his eyes dazed.

"I think that changed Yannis a lot," Chisholm said of the attack and Schork's death. The four reporters had got to know each other during the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s and had become a "band of brothers".

FILE PHOTO: A British army officer has her handgun cocked as Iraqi civilians flee fighting in Basra, Iraq, April 6, 2003. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

"He was a great character, a brilliant photographer, a great colleague," Chisholm said.

Behrakis said he hated war, but, like many others, he loved the travel, adventure and camaraderie that came with it. Rather than putting him off, Schork's death drove him back to combat zones, at least for a while.

"His memory helped me to 'return' to covering what I consider the apotheosis of photojournalism: war photography," Behrakis wrote.

FILE PHOTO: A Chechen fighter moves into firing position next to the Presidential Palace in central Grozny during heavy fighting, January 10, 1995. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

HOMECOMING

In recent years, Behrakis spent more time in his native Greece, where he recorded the impact of the financial crisis on the country and the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees entering Europe.

FILE PHOTO: Iranian women pray at the site in Masala square where the body to Ayatollah Khomeini lies in state, in Tehran, Iran, June 5, 1989. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

In 2015, Behrakis and a team of photographers and cameramen worked in relay for months to cover the thousands fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan and beyond.

He took a younger and less experienced photographer, Alkis Konstantinidis, under his wing at that time and the two became close.

Konstantinidis, also part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team, described Behrakis as a tough, demanding mentor who led by example.

FILE PHOTO: A pensioner leans against the main door of a branch of the National Bank as he waits to receive part of his pension in Athens, Greece, July 7, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

"When you get close to him and he opens up, he is a person you want to sit next to and talk to for hours. You will always get something from him."

For a proud Greek with a young daughter, the refugee crisis had a profound effect on Behrakis, causing guilt, insomnia and nightmares.

But it also brought out the best in a photographer who focused on the dignity of humans in distress rather than making them objects of pity.

FILE PHOTO: A pro-government Sierra Leonean fighter bites a bullet as he takes position in no man's land 2 km ahead of Rogberi junction where evidence of executed UN troops were found after heavy fighting between government troops and RUF rebels 100 km north east of Freetown, Sierra Leone, May 23, 2000. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

Triandafyllou was with Behrakis when he took what many consider to be one of his best pictures - of a Syrian refugee carrying and kissing his daughter as he walked down a road in the rain.

"That morning we left the hotel and it was raining and Yannis was complaining," Triandafyllou recalled.

"On the way to the border we saw these refugees and he started taking pictures. After a while I said 'OK, let's go'. He said 'No, no, wait, I don't have the picture.' I was waiting in the car and he eventually came back and said 'OK, I have the picture.' He was looking for this picture."

FILE PHOTO: One of the older sisters of Perwin Mustafa Dihap, a 19-year-old fighter with the YPJ (Women's Protection Force), holds onto her sister's coffin during a funeral procession for two female Kurdish fighters killed during the battle for Kobani against Islamic State militants, in the Turkish town on Suruc, November 7, 2014. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

Behrakis' description of the image was typically unorthodox.

"I would love to be this father; I think every child would love to have a father like this," he explained.

"This picture proves that there are superheroes after all. He doesn't wear a red cape, but he has a black plastic cape made out of garbage bags. For me this represents the universal father and the unconditional love of father to daughter."

FILE PHOTO: A refugee keeps warm by an open fire at a make-shift camp close to a registration centre on the Greek island of Lesbos, November 18, 2015. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/File photo

In 2017, Yannis launched a project to help Reuters build a more diverse team of news photographers.

His appearances at photo festivals and events around the world inspired many young journalists to apply for a bursary from Reuters. He was very proud of this work, and was still looking for a new generation of talent right up until his death.

Behrakis is survived by his wife Elisavet and their daughter Rebecca and his son Dimitri.