In 1979 the photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who has died aged 78 after suffering from Lewy body dementia, published his first photobook, The Teds. The extended picture essay began as a commission from New Society magazine to document the revival of the 1950s teddy boys, a rebellious British youth movement that adopted dandyish Edwardian-style clothing, and which in combination with the rise of rock’n’roll contributed to an emerging sense of teenage identity.
In the same year Steele-Perkins became a nominee member of Magnum Photos, the co-operatively owned agency co-founded by one of his early influences, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1983 became a full member; later, he served as its president (1995-98). He shot stories across Africa, central and south America and Lebanon, and made multiple visits to Afghanistan in the period 1994-98 (followed by a book in 2000), highlighting human experience over more conventionally newsworthy events, but his most striking work was done in Britain.
In 1973-75 he shot streetlife 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. Answering a small ad pinned up in the Photographers’ Gallery in 1975 led to him joining the Exit Photography Group, a collective documenting the challenges impacting Britain’s inner cities. Working alongside Paul Trevor and Nicholas Battye, he set about his part of an ambitious four-year project that was published as the book Survival Programmes (1982).
“We made contact with community organisations 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.”
The Catholic area of West Belfast during a riot at the top of Leeson Street, 1978. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
Steele-Perkins’s projects often overlapped. He photographed teddy boys in their homes and gathering places around the country, and his work in Belfast shot for Exit in 1978 developed into its own extended series, a partisan view of the embattled Catholic community, that finally resulted in a book, The Troubles (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.”
Starting to take colour photographs signalled 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 it is Yangon in Myanmar. When he was two, 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 was educated 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. 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 own ranged from a series on the Jesus Army to candid portraits of Marcel Marceau at Sadler’s Wells theatre, north London, and a rare foreign assignment to Bangladesh shot for relief agencies, pictures from which were shown at Camerawork Gallery in 1974.
A disco in Wolverhampton, 1978. Photograph: Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum
In 1984 he married Jacqueline de Gier, a writer, and they had two sons, Cedric and Cameron. They divorced in 1998, and the following year he married Miyako Yamada, a singer and writer, whom he had met in Tokyo.
He embarked on long-term projects in Japan, “wanting to understand a place that had suddenly given me so much”. Fuji (2002) marked a departure from his usually people-centred works, being inspired by Hokusai’s 19th-century woodblock prints, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Then came Tokyo Love Hello (2006), featuring street scenes. Dividing his time between Japan and his home in East Dulwich, south-east London, Steele-Perkins continued to be active in photography until well into his 70s.
In 2001 he completed a commission from the Side Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, on the Durham coalfields, resulting in Northern Exposures (2007); a series on home carers funded by an Arts Council grant in 2008; and his project The New Londoners, photographing 164 families, including his own, collectively hailing from 187 countries, resulting in a book in 2019. He published books on his work in Afghanistan, Belfast and north-east England, and England, My England (2023), a compendium of his pictures of his homeland taken throughout his working life.
He is survived by Miyako, a stepson, Daisuke, and his sons.
Christopher Horace Steele-Perkins, photographer, born 28 July 1947; died 8 September 2025
