A quick flip back to blighty to drop the film off at a lab and a turn round back to India. It was less expensive to fly back from Hong Kong to London and then re trace my steps back to Delhi than go direct. Global footprint, pah!

India was hot and busy and beautifully disjointed. I had a driver to take me to a cemetery, out of the centre. I asked if he knew the way. Yes, of course. Three hours later after a breakdown and running out of fuel we found the location with the help of some striking student doctors.


Deli Memorial, India Gate, at the end of Rajpath.

India Gate is a huge Lutyens designed memorial in the centre of Delhi. I tried photographing during the day but the light was so hard and bright that all detail was lost. I returned an hour before dusk. I made a decent frame from the back of my Tuk tuk and then followed a family making an evening visit, saris wafting as the women walked.

Mumbai makes Delhi seem almost at peace. The Memorial Hall is in the Seaman’s mission in the old dock area. I don’t think many visitors come here. Poona was next, up in the hills. A month before my arrival the cemetery was 10 feet under water and a lot of damage was done. The headstones were green with algae. So a little PS work was done here.


Kirkee War Cemetery, Poona, India.

Home again to do some editing and post production before heading off to Ottawa and Newfoundland. In the whole of North America, Canada and the USA there are over 3000 CWGC headstones and memorials. Some are so remote, such as in Saskatchewan that it take days off road to find them, others are in Beechwood Military Memorial Cemetery in Ottawa.

The most moving though are the single graves high on the hills above the sea in remote Newfoundland. My driver told me that I had the first clear day for over a month when we off to find the graves at Topsail and Ferryland. The following day the weather closed in and I was stranded at Newfoundland International airport for 36 hours.

Back home before my last visit to the Ypres salient in Belgium. The Belgians had agreed to give us space to exhibit at The Cloth Hall in Ypres so we needed some more images from the area.
This was the completion of my circle, Tyne Cot cemetery in 1969 and back again in 2006. This time though I arranged to have a cherry picker on hand to make a majestic overview from 100 feet up.


Lijssenthoek, Belgium: The Great War cemeteries

Thousands of miles, hundred of films, over one thousand scans from 250 locations and some of the worlds best and worst hotels and restaurants plus 85 gigabytes of files for my client. None of which would have been possible without the help of esteemed colleague Graham Trott who lent me his manual focus 18mm Nikkor lens to replace my own lens which I decided to re design by gouging out a chunk of glass from the front element after falling 18 feet from half way up a cross of sacrifice.

I am proud of Remembered, I believe the whole product, the writing by Julie Summers, the use of archival photographs and the space afforded to my images over 150 pages is a fitting testimonial to the memory of the fallen.

Their name liveth for evermore.

The book and exhibition, ‘Remembered’, will be officially launched at Canada House in London on the 21 May 2007. Henry Allingham at 110 Britain’s oldest surviving WW1 Veteran will open the exhibition of photographs. The exhibition will be open weekdays until mid July. An additional exhibition of photographs will open at the Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium on July 6th.



Remembered: text by Julie Summers; photographs by Brian Harris, and foreword by Ian Hislop.


Published by Merrell of London and New York to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

‘Beautiful and uplifting photographs by Brian Harris’, Andrew Marr, Start the Week, BBC Radio 4.

‘The immeasurable success of this ( Remembered Book ) can be viewed in Brian Harris’s sumptuous photos’, Robert Pike, The Walden Local.

‘A pictorial odyssey…evocative photographs’, Peter Davies, The Times

‘ Stunning images cast new light on nine decades of tireless effort in the name of remembrance’, The Royal British Legion Magazine.

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