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 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.
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."
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.
"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.
"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'."
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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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.
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 wrote.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
(Reporting and writing by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Simon
Robinson)
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