FILE PHOTO:A member of the Ukrainian synchronised swimming team performs its free routine during an Olympic Games qualification tournament at the Olympic Aquatic Centre of the Athens Olympic Sports Complex (OAKA) April 17, 2004. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis/
Photo: Reuters
For 30 years, Athens-born Behrakis covered many of the most tumultuous events around the world, including conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Chechnya, a huge earthquake in Kashmir, and the Egyptian uprising of 2011.
Behrakis receives the Photo Trophy awarded by Nikon during the closing ceremony of the 2016 Bayeux-Calvados festival in Bayeux, France, in October 2016.
"My mission is to tell you the story and then you decide what you want to do," he once said in discussing the European migrant crisis. "My mission is to make sure that nobody can say: 'I didn't know'."
His pictures won international awards, including the World Press Photo in 2000 and Photographer of the Year by The Guardian in 2015.
A Syrian refugee holds onto his children as he struggles to leave a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing part of the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Lesbos, in September 2015.
Behrakis led a team of Reuters photographers to the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, covering the refugee crisis.
"His pictures shaped the very way in which we perceived events, from the war in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone to the refugee crisis and the Arab Spring,” Greece's foreign press association said.
Antigovernment protesters carry an injured man on a stretcher after clashes with riot police on Independence Square in Kyiv on February 20, 2014.
In a message posted on Twitter, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi praised Behrakis for highlighting the plight of refugees.
“Mourning photographer @yannisBehrakis, who helped us remember a fact most obvious but frequently forgotten - that fleeing refugees are above all human beings in danger and distress,” Grandi said.
FILE PHOTO: Iranian women pray at the site in Masala square where the body to Ayatollah Khomeini lies in state, in Tehran, Iran, June 5, 1989. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis
FILE PHOTO: A woman from an African Islamic country (in white) stands among Iranian women during the national anthem of Iran at the opening session of the 8th Islamic Conference Summit in Tehran's new conference building on December 9. REUTERS/Yannis Behr
FILE PHOTO: A man is carried at the site in Masala square where the body to Ayatollah Khomeini lies in state, in Tehran, Iran, June 5, 1989. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis
Kurdish Syrian immigrant Sahin Serko cries next to his 7-year-old daughter Ariana minutes after crossing the border into Macedonia near the Greek village of Idomeni on May 14, 2015.
Kurdish civilians are seen atop a hill overlooking the Syrian town of Kobani on November 3, 2014.
