Behrakis was born in Athens in 1960 and had his first foreign assignment to Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya. The photographer’s body of work spanned wars and crises around the world, yet was known to focus on the dignity of humans in distress, rather than pure pity. Behrakis documented a variety of events and visited numerous conflict zones and areas where natural disasters had hit, including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afganistan, Lebanon, the first and second Gulf wars in Iraq, the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the civil war in Ukraine, the NATO bombing of ISIS in Kobane, Syria, the Greek financial crisis and the refugee crisis in 2015.
Described by colleagues as ‘a hurricane’, with a ferocious work ethic, Behrakis did not pretend to wield his lens with absolute neutrality. “I’m there to record the best and the worst of humankind,” he said; but he also regarded his job as giving a voice to those who had none and bringing their plight before the eyes of the world.
One of his most iconic photographs from the wars in former Yugoslavia is the one that shows an ethnic Albanian man placing the dead body of two-year-old Mozzlum Sylmetaj into a coffin,
next to the coffins of three other relatives killed by Yugoslav army troops as they were crossing into Kosovo from Albania, October 23, 1998.
In 2000, Behrakis survived an ambush in Sierra Leone where a very dear friend American Reuters reporter Kurt Schork and Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of APT were killed. He and South African cameraman Mark Chisholm managed to get away from the attackers. Both survived the attack by crawling into the undergrowth beside the road and hiding in the jungle for hours until the gunmen disappeared.
“I think that changed Yannis a lot,” Mark Chisholm said of the attack and Kurt 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’. “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 blood marked my clothes and his loss marked my soul forever. His memory helped me to ‘return’ to covering what I consider the apotheosis of photojournalism: war photography.” Yannis wrote.
Behrakis covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years and, moving to Jerusalem in 2008/09, became Reuters’ chief photographer for the region. In 2010 he moved back to Greece to cover the financial crisis, and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean in 2015. Behrakis attracted many accolades over his career, including winning the Bayeux-Calvados Awards for war correspondents three times. He won First Prize in the General News Stories category at World Press Photo in 2000 for his work on Kosovo. The Guardian’s agency Photographer of the Year for 2015 and led a Thomson Reuters team to win the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for their work on the European refugee crisis. “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. “My mission is to make sure that nobody can say, ‘I didn’t know’.”
“I would love to be this father;
I think every child would love to have a father like this.”
Yannis Behrakis
“I have been covering refugees and migrants for over 25 years, but this year has been different: migrants are arriving in my homeland”. Along with his moving photographs of refugees, his photos of the crisis are just as affecting, capturing the hardships of his fellow countrymen in a time of bank closures, capital controls, demonstrations and riots. For Yannis it is clear that photography is far more than just a job, passionate about the medium itself and its power to ‘leave people speechless’. “It can send a message to the audience, make people cry or laugh or both.
It can make people feel guilty – or give money for a good cause. And it can make people think twice before pulling the trigger.” Yannis said.
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.
“His pictures are iconic; some works of art in their own right. But it was his empathy that made him a great photojournalist.”
“It was never about ego, but about furthering his mission to explain and to prevent anyone being able to ignore what his lens had captured.” Peter Bale, Reuters correspondent and editor.
YANNIS BEHRAKIS was born 29 August 1960 in Athens, Greece.
He passed away 2 March 2019.
Please watch TEDxAthens talk Yannis did in 2013:
A Sierra Leone story: Yannis Behrakis
Cover photo by Enric Martí
Music used: ‘Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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