Yannis Behrakis documented the Middle East like few others

Greek photojournalist Yannis Behrakis at a refugee camp in Ras Ajdir, Tunisia. Yannis Behrakis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, has died. He was 58. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo)

Greek photojournalist Yannis Behrakis, while on assignment, looks at anti-government demonstrators in Tahrir square, Cairo. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo)

Greek photographer Yannis Behrakis after receiving the Photo Trophy awarded by Nikon during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Bayeux-Calvados festival in Bayeux, northwestern France. (AFP)

Amoun, 70, a blind Palestinian refugee who lived in the town of Aleppo in Syria, rests on a beach moments after arriving on a dinghy in the Greek island of Kos. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)

A rebel fighter mans an anti-aircraft machine gun atop a pick-up truck as he scans the sky for NATO planes over the front-line along the western entrance of Ajdabiyah, Libya. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)

Egyptian demonstrators brave police water canons and tear gas during a protest in Cairo. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)

Frantic Kurdish refugees struggle for a loaf of bread during a humanitarian aid distribution at the Iraqi-Turkish border. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)

An Iraqi woman walks back home to the southern city of Basra as fires rage in the distance. (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters)

• During his decades-long career at Reuters, Behrakis covered seismic events in the region, including the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and the Syrian refugee crisis
• 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

LONDON: Photographer Yannis Behrakis, who has died aged 58, helped document the recent history of the Middle East like few others.
During his decades-long career at Reuters, Behrakis covered seismic events in the region, including the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and the Syrian refugee crisis, for which his team earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
One of Behrakis’ photos from the latter assignment shows a Syrian carrying his young child during a storm and kissing her —  an image that can still be seen as the background to the photographer’s Twitter account.
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 visited numerous conflict zones and areas where natural disasters had hit, including Afghanistan, Chechnya and the site of a huge earthquake in Kashmir.
“My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: ‘I didn’t know’,” Behrakis once said of his work. “My mission is to tell you the story and then you decide what you want to do.”
Many paid tribute to Behrakis after his death following a battle with cancer, which was confirmed by his employer Reuters, where he worked since 1987.
Nir Elias, Reuters’ chief photographer in Israel, first met Behrakis in the early 2000s. “He was full of passion for work,” said Elias. “He cared a lot about what he shot.”
Elias said his late colleague was a little “crazy” in his early years, but that evolved into what he described as an “ideological” journalist.
“He went into places where people were really scared to go,” he said. “In the early years he was bad crazy. But then, with the years, he turned to be good crazy, a very very warm, very Mediterranean guy … He liked to talk, he liked to help, he liked to be around people.”
Behrakis’ work was “classic news photography” and, unlike many others in the industry, not driven purely by ego, Elias said.
“Yannis wasn’t going to the edges of classic art … The main thing was basically the subject. If you look over his pictures (they are) very direct,” Elias said.
Behrakis’ approach was that “someone needs to go and show the world what’s going on,” Elias added. “He was one of those people that go all the way.”
Peter Bale, who knew and worked with Behrakis as a Reuters correspondent and editor in the 1990s, said that the photographer was moved by the plight of Syrian refugees crossing to Greece.
“(He) committed himself to showing their story. His pictures are often shot so close that you feel you are in the boat with the refugees or that they are handing their children to you,” said Bale.
“Yannis also went out with rescue boats in the Mediterranean, saving migrants sent out from the coasts of Libya. He wanted to document the extraordinary risks they took and prevent us turning our backs on them.
“Yannis was the sort of person who went toward danger, not away from it. He wasn’t reckless, but he was determined to get closer and to tell the story from the best possible vantage point.”
In 2000, Behrakis narrowly escaped an ambush by gunmen — most likely rebels — while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone. His Reuters colleague Kurt Schork and AP cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno were killed in the attack.
“His escape from the ambush marked him forever, and he constantly honored Kurt and others who had paid a the ultimate price for reporting from the frontlines of conflict,” said Bale.
After winning the Pulitzer, Behrakis spent time touring schools and universities explaining his work. “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,” Bale said.
Behrakis is survived by his wife, Elisavet, and their daughter Rebecca, and a son, Dimitri, from a previous marriage.