Misan Harriman Photographs Stars Including Liam Neeson, Kate Winslet

Surreal. That’s how Misan Harriman describes his first time at the Academy Awards earlier this year. Six years before, his wife had bought him a Fujifilm X100 for his 40^th birthday and encouraged him to start taking pictures with it. Then there he was, surrounded by the global industry’s most overachieving, himself an Oscar-nominated director.

He had always loved film, having been raised on ’80s and ’90s cinema like The Lost Boys, Big Trouble in Little China and Stand By Me. He describes Home Aloneof all things, as “more than entertainment for troubled kids like me,” and will share his connection to the classic movie’s study of “trauma response” and the way it, and films like it, saved him. Born in Nigeria in 1977, Harriman was the only Black kid at his British boarding school. “With my kind of neurodiversity, I’m not supposed to be good at anything,” he says. “I failed every exam I took, dropped out of school, university, all that.”

Cinema quickly became his way of connecting to the world. He was obsessed with the cinematography of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndonto the point of delivering a school presentation on its use of light when he was 9 years old. “I became a cinephile without even really realizing it. And I guess it was because I was looking for the meaning behind all of the things that confused me about life. I found the answers in film.”

So, why did it take him so long to think it was something he might be able to do for a living? “Self-doubt and self-love are bedfellows,” he says. “I met a woman that fell in love with the parts of myself I was ashamed of and saw the boy in me that saw the world with wonder. She was the one who said, ‘That boy needs to express his point of view.’ I needed someone to love me a little bit to lead me to this journey.”

The camera was a little digital, fixed-lens gem that is still beloved among photographers for its similarity to film. Harriman turned to YouTube to figure out how to use it, seeking out content creators with small subscriber bases like Mattias Burling, whose passion is buying secondhand cameras and figuring out their quirks. “There’s always a middle-aged man or woman in their garage explaining to you how things work,” Harriman says.

“You feel you can fail without fear of judgment. The top guys [on YouTube] make you feel insecure. They’re like jumping out of helicopters in Antarctica. But the smaller ones, they’re learning too, and they’re much more passionate about shooting than they are about being content producers.”

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And so, he went out and started shooting. “Fail, fail, fail, fail, and then fail again. I just kept tweaking my failures with help from my YouTube friends.”

Harriman’s work to this day is as focused on capturing everyday life as it was at the beginning. He would hit the streets of London and observe. Find slices of life in every frame he took. He took a trip to Rajasthan in India, “the most beautiful place in the world,” and aimed his lens at unusual things. “The photos were sh*t,” he laughs. “But I cherish those images as much as I do all these iconic shots people keep telling me I’ve taken, because they remind me that little failures can become big wins.”

The watershed moment for him came when Covid happened. 99% of his images, he estimates, he has taken since 2020. “It’s crazy, because it really wasn’t that long ago when you think about it.” He had been uploading his favorite shots to a little Instagram account he had maintained, but he never really saw a following.

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When George Floyd was killed in May of that year, and the Black Lives Matter movement led to global protests, the activist in Harriman was compelled to capture them. He went back out onto the streets of London to shoot a series of images of the protests and uploaded them to his Instagram account. Martin Luther King III came across them and reposted, leading to more reposts from a slew of celebrities. “I don’t think any of them knew they’d been taken in London,” Harriman says.

It could be suggested that his viral success was luck, but Harriman’s images captured the protests in a way that resonated precisely because he felt as passionately about the movement as the protesters did. He found stories he could tell within single frames because he understood those stories. By the time the then-editor of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, chose to use the magazine’s landmark September issue to celebrate activism, Harriman had become the only choice to photograph cover stars like Marcus Rashford and Adwoa Aboah. It made him the first Black person in the 104-year history of the magazine to shoot the cover of the September issue. “That’s how flipping, utterly crazy is my life,” Harriman says. “It’s been a wild journey since then.”

There isn’t a celebrity now who wouldn’t want Harriman to take their portrait, and he’s photographed many, including Angelina Jolie, Danielle Brooks, Salma Hayek Pinault, Spike Lee and Harrison Ford. On our next pages, he will share some of his favorite work, which includes shots of Liam Neeson and Kate Winslet. But, for Harriman, it is his work on activism that resonates strongest.

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“When I’m dead and buried, my civil rights work is always going to be my most cherished work,” he says. “I know I’ve photographed a lot of famous people, but that is not as important to me as being on the tip of the spear for women’s rights, children’s rights, the queer and trans communities, climate change and race. If I’m hit by a car, I hope my children will say of me, ‘My daddy cared enough not to look away.’”

The short film that brought him his first Oscar nomination was The Afterreleased last year by Netflix and starring David Oyelowo. It was a haunting portrait of grief that, Harriman says, may now be one of the most watched shorts in history thanks to the platform the streamer offered him. This move into the moving image feels inevitable when Harriman details his connection to cinema, and while he fully intends to move into features by telling the kinds of popular stories he grew up on, he is also fully invested in finding similar meaning in everything he does.

“I’m a big zombie guy,” he says, out of leftfield. “I was desperate to get the rights to [an English-language remake of] Train to Busanbut I was too late. But with all great zombie films, the monsters are never the zombies. I’m developing a vampire story right now, because I love the idea of immortality and the fleeting nature of love.” We’re drawn to these stories because they’re entertaining, but Harriman knows that the best of them teach us something about ourselves, too.

He is working on his first feature, a documentary with Paramount called Protest and Progresswhich will explore the ways protest movements shape social change. “It’s like a character story of my life,” he says. “In a year that there are more elections than have ever been recorded, I’m traveling the world and pointing my lens, but also listening to who we are in the year of 2024.”

He shot some footage at the Oscars. “There’s some really interesting clips of the epitome of celebrity culture. What’s the opposite of that kind of echo chamber of privilege that we live in? Soon after the Oscars I went down to Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, where you can almost see Libya from the seafront. I was there speaking to migrants, the people crossing the sea on little boats. Paramount has given us real resources to observe who we are at a time when there is so much change happening. It feels like a very important piece of witness-bearing.”

He recalls the culture shock of standing by a graveside in Lampedusa so soon after slipping off his Oscar tux. “There are a few spots in this graveyard set aside for migrants, and of course they’re all nameless because we don’t even know their names. I was struck that one of these graves had loads of small plastic boats left on it, to represent how many had been lost at sea. The only remembrance of them is a little tiny plastic boat. It was a real reminder of the inequality of this existence we have. That’s why I do the work.”

Harriman’s work has always been about truth, and it’s work he understands the importance of personally, having seen his own relationship with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex lead to baseless criticism from the British press. “I’m an honorary fellow from SOAS University of London, I have an honorary doctorate from Ravensbourne University. I’m the chair of Europe’s largest art center, the Southbank Centre, and now an NAACP winner and an Oscar nominee,” he notes. “And I was described by a leading newspaper as ‘Meghan Markle’s Snapper Pal.’ That’s very much by design.”

He is determined that whatever success he achieves will be paid forward to marginalized voices. He is wary of what he calls “performative allyship,” in which institutions shore up their diversity requirements to avoid criticism rather than action real change. “As I get more agency, and a bigger platform, I will lift up as many voices who are being ignored for whatever reason as I can,” he says. “Not because it’s my job to, but I always will. As you climb, you lift. Always.”

His ultimate ambition? “To be one of the great filmmakers of my time,” he says, “or at least strive to be. I feel like I know what I could bring to this industry, and I want to spend the next 25 years trying to do it.

“I could fail miserably,” he adds, echoing the humble early days of his move into photography. “But I am definitely going to try.”