Great Photographers
Three decades with Reuters, from Kosovo to Idomeni
Yannis Behrakis (1960–2019) was a Greek photojournalist who worked for Reuters for more than three decades. He covered wars and crises from Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In 2015 he led the Reuters team that documented the refugee crisis in the Aegean and at Idomeni, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.
In their wordsMy mission is to make sure that nobody can say: 'I didn't know'.
Behrakis worked very close to his subjects and almost always photographed the people living through events rather than the events themselves. His Kosovo series (1999) won first prize in General News Stories at World Press Photo 2000, while his coverage of the 2015 refugee crisis brought his work to a far wider audience. His best-known photograph, a Syrian father kissing his daughter in the rain near Idomeni (10 September 2015), was for him an image of "the universal father". He summed up his work in one line: his mission was to make sure that nobody could say "I didn't know".
Yannis Behrakis was born in Athens in 1960. He studied photography at the Athens School of Arts and Technology (AKTO) and earned a BA (Hons) from Middlesex University. In the mid-1980s he worked in a photographic studio.
In 1987 he began shooting for Reuters as a freelancer in Athens and soon joined the agency's staff. Over the following years he covered Libya and Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in Tehran (1989), Kurdish refugees on the Iraq–Turkey border after the Gulf War (1991), Somalia (1992), Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo, Chechnya (1995), Albania (1997) and Kosovo (1998–1999). For many years he was Reuters' chief photographer for Greece and Cyprus.
On 24 May 2000 in Sierra Leone, his team was ambushed by rebels. Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork and APTN cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno were killed; Behrakis and Mark Chisholm survived. He later noted that Schork's memory helped him "return" to war photography. Afghanistan and the fall of Kabul (2001) and the Iraq war (2003) followed.
From 2008 to 2010 he ran Reuters' photo coverage of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. He returned to Greece in 2010 and photographed the economic crisis, and in 2011 covered Egypt and Libya, in 2014 Ukraine and the battle for Kobani from the Turkish border.
In 2015 he led the Reuters team that documented the refugee crisis on Kos, Lesbos and at Idomeni. The team won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, shared with photographers of The New York Times.
He died in Athens on 2 March 2019, aged 58, after a long battle with cancer. He was survived by his wife Elisavet and his children, Rebecca and Dimitri. That same year Athens Photo World established the Yannis Behrakis International Photojournalism Award, first presented to Dar Yasin of the Associated Press.
Work
A Syrian father walks through a rainstorm towards Greece's northern border, wrapped in a black plastic bag, and kisses his daughter. For Behrakis the picture stood for "the universal father" and a father's unconditional love for his child. It is part of the Reuters series that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.
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Overcrowded with Syrian refugees, the dinghy drifted after its motor broke down on the way from the Turkish coast to Kos; the Greek coast guard arrived after a distress call. The small boat on an open horizon shows how exposed the people making the crossing were. It is part of the 2016 Pulitzer series.
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The wife of a Kosovo Liberation Army fighter faints at his funeral in early 1999, when fighting resumed after a fragile truce. The frame belongs to the Kosovo series that won first prize in General News Stories at World Press Photo 2000.
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A Northern Alliance armoured personnel carrier with fighters and the Afghan flag moves to a new position as a woman in a burqa walks along the roadside. It comes from his 2001 coverage of the war in Afghanistan; that work ("Liberation of Afghanistan") won the Public prize at the 2002 Prix Bayeux-Calvados.
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An Iraqi Shiite man carries a flag stained with the blood of believers who wounded themselves to show their love for the Imam, as tens of thousands of pilgrims walk to Karbala through a sandstorm. The picture was taken ten days after the fall of Baghdad.
MoreA Sierra Leone story: Yannis Behrakis at TEDxAthens 2013
2016 Pulitzer Prize seminar: Yannis Behrakis, Reuters photographer
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