Yannis Behrakis

Chief Photographer, Reuters

Born in 1960 in Athens, Greece, where he studied photography at the Athens School of Arts and Technology and received his BA (Honours) in arts by the Middlesex University. Being a photojournalist for Reuters since late 1987, he covered a variety of events including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the civil conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the wars in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon and the first and second Gulf wars. He has also covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years, the earthquakes in Kashmir, Turkey, Greece and Iran, as well as civil unrest and major political events around the world and more recently the events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. He also covered four Summer Olympics, the World Cup in the US and many international sports events. In 2008 he moved to Jerusalem as the  head of the Reuters photo operation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. In 2010 he returned to Greece to cover the financial crisis.

Among several awards, he has been voted seven times News Photographer of the Year by the Greek National Fuji Awards and three times European photojournalist of the year by Fuji in London 1999, Barcelona 2002 and Rome 2004. In 2000 he received the John Faber award from the Overseas Press Club of America in New York. That same year he was honored with the most prestigious Greek journalistic award, the Botsis Foundation Award and he also won the first prize in the General News Stories category, by the World Press Photo Foundation. In the 2002 Bayeux Awards for war correspondents – he won the second prize in the photography category for his pictures of the liberation of Kabul, as well the Prix de Public (the public’s choice). He also won the 2004 and 2009 awards in the China International Press Photo Contest.

In 2011 he was awarded an award of excellence, by the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association), in the General News Stories category in the Best of Photojournalism competition. In 2012 he won the second place in General News in the prestigious POYi (Pictures of the Year international).