Misan Harriman: The Photographer Using His Lens for Change
Misan Harriman
From British Vogue's Activism Now cover to the frontlines of London's Gaza protests, a self-taught photographer has spent the years since refusing to stay silent.
Misan Harriman didn't pick up a camera until he was forty. He's since photographed a British Vogue cover, directed an Oscar-nominated short film, and become one of the most recognisable faces documenting Britain's protest movements from the inside.
His portfolio holds both ends of that range at once. There are the celebrity portraits and the September 2020 British Vogue cover, "Activism Now," shot with Marcus Rashford and Adwoa Aboah.
And there is the work he now describes as the most important thing he does: standing in the middle of London's marches for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to UK arms sales to Israel, camera up, documenting whoever is standing in front of him.
"I have two little girls, and I want to look them in the eye and say that I fought tooth and nail with my camera and my voice to allow them to inherit a better world," he has said of the shift.
Harriman often points to Peter Magubane, the South African photographer whose images helped turn the world against apartheid, as proof that a camera can move history rather than just record it. His own exhibition, The Purpose of Light, at Hope 93 in London, gathers years of that belief into one room: images of resistance, solidarity, and people refusing to look away from a war most of the world was scrolling past.
One photograph in the show stays with him more than the others: a woman at a protest, holding a sign that reads "These days will define us."
"Because they will. They really will."
What Harriman says he keeps finding at these protests isn't just grief, it's unity he doesn't see reflected in the news coverage. "I saw a queer woman helping a Muslim mum with her baby," he's said. "This is the best of this country." Even inside the horror of the war itself, he locates something like hope in the sheer size and range of people showing up together.
"We are fighting for the soul of humanity," he says. "If we don't act, we will be haunted by the ghosts of dead children and the screams of the living."
Apathy is lethal. I am politely begging all of us, whether we have fifty followers or fifty million, we can carve out a future our children deserve to inherit.
Misan Harriman, Democracy Now!, June 2026
In 2026, that outspokenness collided with his other job. Harriman has chaired the board of London's Southbank Centre, Britain's largest arts institution, since 2021. Over the spring, a handful of his social media posts, including one that critics said compared the rise of Reform UK to conditions preceding the Holocaust, drew sustained coverage from the Telegraph, the Times, and the Mail, and more than sixty MPs and peers wrote to the Culture Secretary asking for a formal review. Harriman has rejected the antisemitism characterization and says the posts were about the far right and about a Muslim victim of the Golders Green attack he felt had been overlooked in the coverage.
He announced in June that he'd step down as chair this autumn, after two terms, and says that decision was made back in January, months before any of this became public. More than thirty thousand people signed a petition backing him, with public support from figures including Brian Eno, Tracey Emin, Riz Ahmed, and Billy Bragg, and the UK's press regulator flagged the coverage itself as a possible breach of its own editors' code.
"I've organized for Black Lives Matter, championed women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, transgender protections, and for the Ukrainians during the war, and no one has had a problem until I started speaking out against Israel's actions in Gaza," Harriman told Hyperallergic.
"To have by far the most complaints in British newspaper history means the people have had enough. If the Independent Press Standards Organisation has any legitimacy, it must not let the impunity of the right-wing press continue in this way."
It's a dispute that isn't close to settled, and reasonable people land on different sides of it. What isn't in dispute is that Harriman keeps showing up with a camera anyway.
"What I've learned is that human beings can be monsters, much scarier than the monsters that were supposed to be under your bed. I've learnt that. I've seen it."
More from Misan Harriman
Leila Antakly has been in conversation with artists and creatives from around the world since 2003. Twenty-three years spent building an independent cultural archive of more than 1,000 original conversations with creative people around the world. She didn't just collect the interviews. She curated them, conducted them, edited them, and built the digital experience around them.
— Leila Antakly
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