Acclaimed British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who documented Britain's social fabric and global conflicts for over five decades, died at age 78 after suffering from Lewy body dementia. The photographer, best known for his groundbreaking work with Magnum Photos and his intimate portrayals of British subcultures, left behind a remarkable legacy that captured the essence of human experience across multiple continents.
Steele-Perkins first gained recognition in 1979 with the publication of his photobook "The Teds," an extended picture essay that began as a commission from New Society magazine. The project documented the revival of the 1950s teddy boys, a rebellious British youth movement that adopted dandyish Edwardian-style clothing and, combined with the rise of rock and roll, contributed to an emerging sense of teenage identity. This work established his reputation for finding compelling stories within British society's margins.
In the same year, Steele-Perkins became a nominee member of Magnum Photos, the cooperatively owned agency co-founded by one of his early influences, Henri Cartier-Bresson. He achieved full membership in 1983 and later served as the organization's president from 1995 to 1998. Throughout his career with Magnum, he shot stories across Africa, Central and South America, and Lebanon, making multiple visits to Afghanistan between 1994 and 1998, which resulted in a book published in 2000. His approach consistently highlighted human experience over conventionally newsworthy events.
However, Steele-Perkins' most striking and influential work was done in Britain. From 1973 to 1975, he photographed street life in Brixton, South London, where he lived, and visited other parts of London to document festivals and countercultural happenings, contrasting them with scenes of the establishment. His career took a significant turn in 1975 when he answered a small advertisement pinned up in the Photographers Gallery, leading him to join the Exit Photography Group, a collective documenting the challenges impacting Britain's inner cities.
Working alongside Paul Trevor and Nicholas Battye, Steele-Perkins contributed to an ambitious four-year project that was published as the book "Survival Programmes" in 1982. "We made contact with community organizations in search of contacts," he later recalled. "We also did a lot of walking around deprived districts, talking to people in the street, knocking on doors. There was a different relationship that people had to photography then, compared to now. People welcomed us into their homes."
Steele-Perkins' projects often overlapped and evolved organically. He photographed teddy boys in their homes and gathering places around the country, while his work in Belfast, initially shot for Exit in 1978, developed into its own extended series. This partisan view of the embattled Catholic community finally resulted in a book titled "The Troubles," published in 2021. "I intended to cover the situation from the standpoint of the underdog, the downtrodden," he later recalled. "I was not neutral and was not interested in capturing it so."
A significant shift in Steele-Perkins' work came when he began taking color photographs, signaling a changing attitude both in Britain and in himself. "Gradually, the alienation – so much part of my childhood – faded," he wrote in "The Pleasure Principle" (1989), reflecting on the British at leisure in the 1980s. "Travel reactivated my buried sense of apartness from England, but not with the old feeling of oppression, for now I had a different perspective. Now there was a sense of almost anthropological detachment, a heightened sense of life's oddity, and the peculiarly surreal forms it takes in England."
Chris was born in Rangoon during the last tumultuous months of colonial rule in British Burma, now known as Yangon in Myanmar. When he was two years old, his father, Horace, a wing commander in the RAF, abandoned Chris's Burmese mother, Mary, and brought him to live in Somerset. "There was no ethnic community into which I could retreat," he later wrote in the introduction to "The Pleasure Principle," describing the difficulties of growing up mixed race in the monoculture of Burnham-on-Sea. "So, in the heartland of Anglo-Saxon England, I forged the peculiar bonds that bind me to this country."
He received his education at Christ's Hospital school in Horsham, West Sussex, and later studied psychology at Newcastle University, where he volunteered on the student newspaper and began taking photography seriously. After graduating in 1970, he moved to London the following year, determined to become a freelance photographer and encouraged by the multi-page spreads given over to photo-essays in broadsheet weekend supplements. His early work ranged from a series on the Jesus Army to candid portraits of Marcel Marceau at Sadler's Wells theatre in North London, and a rare foreign assignment to Bangladesh shot for relief agencies, with pictures shown at Camerawork Gallery in 1974.
In 1984, Steele-Perkins married Jacqueline de Gier, a writer, and they had two sons, Cedric and Cameron. Following their divorce in 1998, he married Miyako Yamada, a singer and writer whom he had met in Tokyo, the following year. This relationship opened new chapters in his photographic journey, as he embarked on long-term projects in Japan, wanting to understand a place that had "suddenly given me so much."
His Japanese work marked a departure from his usually people-centered photographs. "Fuji" (2002) was inspired by Hokusai's 19th-century woodblock prints, "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji," while "Tokyo Love Hello" (2006) featured street scenes that captured the essence of urban Japanese life. Dividing his time between Japan and his home in East Dulwich, Southeast London, Steele-Perkins continued to be active in photography well into his 70s.
Steele-Perkins remained prolific in his later years, completing several significant projects. In 2001, he finished a commission from the Side Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne on the Durham coalfields, resulting in "Northern Exposures" (2007). He also created a series on home carers funded by an Arts Council grant in 2008, and undertook "The New Londoners" project, photographing 164 families, including his own, collectively hailing from 187 countries, which resulted in a book published in 2019.
Throughout his career, Steele-Perkins published numerous books documenting his work in Afghanistan, Belfast, and Northeast England. His final major publication, "England, My England" (2023), served as a comprehensive compendium of his pictures of his homeland taken throughout his working life, cementing his legacy as one of Britain's most important documentary photographers. He is survived by his wife Miyako, a stepson Daisuke, and his sons Cedric and Cameron. Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins was born on July 28, 1947, and died on September 8, 2025.
