Chris Steele-Perkins was born in 1947 in Rangoon, Burma, now Myanmar. His father was English, and his mother Burmese. From the age of two, he lived in Burnham, England, with his father, and attended school in Sussex, before studying Psychology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He worked on the student newspaper and was inspired to become a photojournalist by documentary essays he had seen in The Sunday Times by photographers including Don McCullin.
For the first two decades of his career, Steele-Perkins focused his work on social conditions in Britain. Living in London in the 1970s, he photographed the capital’s residents and customs, including street parties in Brixton, where he lived. In 1975, he joined the Exit Photography Group. With Nicholas Battye and Paul Trevor, he documented inner city poverty from Glasgow to Middlesbrough, during a time of economic transition in urban Britain. The resulting book, Survival Programmes, includes interview transcripts, drafts and other materials, forming a thorough reportage of both social values and social justice.
Steele-Perkins’s work with the Exit Group sought to weave together different types of social violence against poor communities in Britain at the hands of the government, whose military strategies in Northern Ireland became the blueprint for police expansion across many major British cities. In Belfast, Steele-Perkins met individuals who squatted in the city’s Divis Flats, and portrayed the lives of its Catholic communities. This work was later collected in his 2021 publication, The Troubles.
“I intended to cover the situation from the standpoint of the underdog, the downtrodden: I was not neutral and was not interested in capturing it so,” he wrote in the introduction to The Troubles. “I was interested in how life was lived in its various facets, not just the rioting and the military occupation, though I couldn’t ignore that which was so prevalent, but also the leisure, the entertainment, the homes, the fun, the funerals and the community. I was not there to illustrate a thesis but to enter the unknown, interacting and responding, and attempting to remain honest. […] I began to see that my work in Northern Ireland had always been a celebration of the resilience and unyielding way that the Catholic community resisted.”
Pursuing his interest in socio-political conflicts, Steele-Perkins also captured racist movements and their counter-movements in Britain in the late 1970s and ‘80s, when right-wing political parties such as the National Front were gaining support. His series for the Sunday Times Magazine took him to Wolverhampton, where he explored the lives of ethnic minorities ten years after Enoch Powell’s controversial speech condemning immigration in Britain. In 1979, he photographed South Asian communities protesting in Southall, West London in response to the death of left-wing activist Blair Peach, who was thought to have been killed by a police officer.
Steele-Perkins’s three-year project on 1970s revivalists of the Teddy Boys, a subculture that began in the 1950s, further attests to his interest in investigating the various facets of British identity and his dedication to immersing himself in his subject matter. Traveling across England, he documented not only the revived trend but the everyday lives of the rebellious youth. The project became his seminal book The Teds, published in 1979. “What I tried to do was to document a subculture, and quite a major one in British society,” he said. “I went into their homes and documented them in all kinds of contexts, and the clothes, in the end, became relatively peripheral to the whole thing. […] It’s much more about identity and who we are.”
That same year, Steele-Perkins joined Magnum Photos, and turned his focus to stories further afield. Initially planning to visit Zimbabwe for a week, he stayed in Africa for two months, an experience that inspired his gravitation towards the continent over the next two decades.
Compelled to document social phenomena and the complexities of the human condition, Steele-Perkins’s projects were often driven by his personal curiosity. “Things grabbed me. The Teds grabbed me. The inner city problems grabbed me. Africa, for 20-odd years, grabbed me.”
In the 1980s, he took vivid images exploring people’s leisure pursuits in Thatcher-era Britain, published in the book The Pleasure Principle. “Previously my work had been focused on particulars of Britain: poverty, sub-culture. I did not have any parallel reality against which to properly assess my position,” he wrote in an interview around the book. “Exposure to other cultures, the massive shifts in relationships to people, the direct confrontation with the fact that things are different. Really different: worse, better, harder, more dangerous, shocking, fabulous, relaxed, harmonious… A kaleidoscope of experiences, of often extraordinary power, could not help but change my relationship to England…
“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.”
It was during this time that he made his transition into color photography, though some major projects, such as his 1994–1998 investigation of Afghanistan, were in black and white, still the favored medium of many photojournalists at the time. The photobook Afghanistan captures the photographer’s visceral experience of the country and its people: “It was heroic, beautiful, violent, twisted, gracious, and tragic,” he said. “The experience of being there works its way into one’s being; an infection of the soul demanding that you return.”
After his marriage to Miyako Yamada, Steele-Perkins embarked on a long-term photographic exploration of Japan, publishing Fuji in 2000. “Life got better and far more complicated, as it does when you fall hopelessly in love,” he said. “I now had a compelling reason for being in Japan and for photographing Japan, wanting to understand a place that had suddenly given me so much.” His book Echoes, a highly personal, diaristic account of his life over the course of the year 2001, is an intimate vignette of time passing and the reverberations of memory.
In 2007, he published Tokyo Love Hello, a love letter to the capital, along with Northern Exposures, a documentation of rural life in County Durham. In 2009, he published England, My England, a retrospective collection piecing together 40 years of photographing the country. His book on British centenarians, Fading Light, was published in 2012 and A Place in the Country, a year in the life of an English country estate was published in 2014. His project documenting diversity and migration in London was published in the photobook The New Londoners in 2019.
The photographer’s poetic approach to the medium is felt throughout his expansive career, during which he saw his images as “the fragments of memory, the silent echoes of experience.”
Steele-Perkins lived in East Dulwich in South London during the later period of his life, before moving to Japan with his wife Miyako. He passed away peacefully, aged 78, with Miyako at his side.
Gregory Halpern, Magnum Co-President, writes: “It is with deep sadness that we reflect on the passing of Chris Steele-Perkins. Chris had a gift for finding lyricism in daily life — whether in the defiance and style of the Teddy Boys in The Teds, the resilience and struggle of communities across the UK in England, My England and The Troubles, or the quiet, intimate landscapes and portraits of Japan in Fuji. His photographs could be both tender and unsparing, revealing both dignity and difficulty in equal measure, and they have shaped the way many of us think about what photography can do.
“For 46 years, Chris was a vital part of Magnum Photos. His powerful photography helped define what photojournalism could be. His dedication to storytelling and generous mentorship shaped countless colleagues and inspired photographers and audiences everywhere.
“Our thoughts are with his family and friends. His loss is felt deeply within Magnum, but his influence will continue — in the images he leaves behind, and in the example he set for so many photographers who came after him.”