,Magnum photographer and celebrated photojournalist Chris Steele-Perkins has died aged 78. His beautifully-crafted documentary images of people and of war zones will live on in as a lasting memory of his long career.
Chris was born in Myanmar (then Burma) in 1947 and was brought to live in Somerset in the west of England when he was two years old. His father was English and his mother Burmese. He was, he said, the only person of Asian appearance living in Burnham-on-Sea in the 1950s. “I belonged most of the time, but I knew I was different,” he says in The New Londoners. “The repeated question, nine out of ten times well-meaning, was ‘Where are you from?’”
He started taking photographs as a hobby while he was a psychology student at Newcastle University, but his passion for the medium didn’t really ignite until he began shooting for his student newspaper. The subjects he covered ranged from sports to live appearances by rock band The Who. “I enjoyed the challenge, because you had a real deadline and had to produce something that was reproducible on a page,” he says.
He was inspired by the photojournalism of Don McCullin, Leonard Freed and others he saw published in British newspapers such as The Sunday Times and The Observer. Attracted by the way they gave their own take on a particular situation or event, Chris decided he wanted to follow in their footsteps. “I was looking at this stuff and thinking, ‘Wow, this is good. That’s what I’d like to do,’” he recalls.
After leaving university, Chris began coming up with photo-story ideas, often based on newspaper reports, and selling them directly to publications. “In the 1970s, it was possible to earn a living by seeing enough magazines and having ideas,” he says. “You came up with a good story and somebody paid you to do it. In this day and age it’s hard to believe we had this golden period, but that’s what it was like.”
The series that brought Chris to wide appreciation was The Teds. In the late ’70s, the Teddy Boy subculture was undergoing a revival and Chris was assigned to document this group for New Society magazine with journalist Richard Smith. Both realised there was much more mileage in the project and continued working on the subject over a three-year period. Their work was published as a book in 1979 and is now regarded as a classic of its kind.
“One of the keys to photography, I think, is spending time with your subject,” he said in 2019. “A big problem with a lot of young photographers’ documentary work is that they just haven’t put enough time into it. There’s no substitute for time. In the case of the Teds, photographing them was also a lot of fun. They had lots of energy and when I’d come back from a night in the pub with them I’d think I’d had a good night.”
By the late ’70s, Chris had an extensive body of work which included his photos of inner city poverty in the UK, undertaken as part of the EXIT Photography Group from 1974 to ’79. Now he wanted to broaden his work and focus on Northern Ireland, but he knew he’d need the backing of an agency to do that. Around the same time, Chris got to know the Magnum photographer Josef Koudelka, who saw and liked Chris’s work and recommended he apply to join the elite agency. He did and was accepted.
It was a turning-point in Chris’s career. “Joining Magnum enabled me to go abroad and travel the world. I felt really lucky. The world’s magazines and newspapers were accessible to me and Magnum was very much set up to work with them.”
It was also inspiring to be part of a group that included major photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bruce Davidson. “It was exciting because I knew these people’s work from a distance. Now I was actually sitting down and having a drink with them, talking about what they were doing and why they were doing it. There was also a lot of competition among members, and everyone was measuring themselves against their peers. So it probably made me raise my game.”
For a period, Chris was known primarily as a war photographer covering the troubles in Northern Ireland, El Salvador’s civil war in the early 1980s, Lebanon (the civil war and Israeli invasion), and the war in Afghanistan. But a close call with a rocket grenade made him rethink his career: " Iwas running from the Taliban at the time I heard it coming towards me, and saw it hit the ground very close by. But it didn’t go off and I just kept running," he said in 2010. ",It was very shortly after that I decided to give up war photography. I had two small kids and wanted to play football with them, using both my legs. I’m not sure if I’d be talking to you now if I’d carried on. It made me rethink what the hell I was doing.
Being part of Magnum also gave Chris financial security. “For 10 years or more, I really wouldn’t worry about where the money was coming from. Literally I could hear about a news story from abroad on the radio and think, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow’ and not worry about the money. I’d know Magnum would sell the story. Then one day it didn’t happen, almost overnight, and the golden age started to disappear.”
Chris reckoned, the decline began as early as 1989. “Magazines and newspapers started doing less interesting stories and giving them less space,” he remembers. “They became more obvious puppets to the consumer society and the editors were quite open about it. It became much more about making money for publishers. They didn’t want people reading about death and destruction over their muesli.”
Since then, Chris has continued working on a mixture of assignments and personal projects, ranging from covering the famine in Somalia in 1992 to a photographic series on centenarians living in the UK, titled Fading Light. His last book of new work,, The New Londoners, was published in 2019 which aimed to show the diversity of the capital through his series of family portraits.
Along the way he has won a number of major awards, including the World Press Photo Oskar Barnack Prize in 1988 and the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1989 for “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.”
Chris Steele-Perkins passed away peacefully in his sleep, on September 8, 2025, in Japan where he had lived with his second wife, Miyako Yamada.
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