Yannis Behrakis

Yannis Behrakis was born in 1960 in Athens. He studied photography in the Athens School of Arts and Technology and received his BA (Honours) from Middlesex University. He worked as a studio photographer in Athens in 1985–86. In 1987 he started a working relation as a contractor for Reuters and in late 1988 he was offered a staff job with the agency based in Athens. His first foreign assignment was in Libya in January 1989. Since then he documented a variety of events including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the first and second Gulf wars in Iraq, the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, the war in Donbas, the NATO bombing of ISIS in Kobane, Syria, the Greek government-debt crisis and the European migrant crisis in 2015. Yanis covered the Siege of Sarajevo. Behrakis died after a long battle with cancer in Athens on 2 March 2019, aged 58.[5] Behrakis is survived by his daughter Rebecca, son Dimitri and his wife, Elisavet.