Yannis Behrakis, award-winning Reuters photographer, dies aged 58
Yannis Behrakis, one of Reuters' most decorated and best-loved photographers, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 58.
Left: A starving Somali child is given water near a refugee camp in Baidoa.
Right: A Somali aid worker carries a dead child for burial in a Baidoa refugee camp.
Behrakis was born in Athens in 1960.
He came across a Time-Life photography book as a young man, which prompted him to enrol in a private photography course. His love affair with the trade had begun.
Left: Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork and Yannis Behrakis at the Overseas Press Club (OPC) dinner in New York where Behrakis won an OPC award for his coverage of Kosovo, and he dedicated his award to Kurt Schork.
Right: Behrakis takes 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.
In 2000, while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone, Behrakis was travelling 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.
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".
"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 later wrote.
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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.
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."
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."
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.