A neurodivergent man who never held a camera before, within four years, became one of the most influential global voices in contemporary photography. If Misan Harriman’s incredible rise as a photographer-filmmaker were the plot of a movie, the audience would dismiss it for being exaggerated or unrealistic. But then, truth is stranger than fiction.
Soon after his powerful photographs of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the UK, in 2020, went viral, Harriman became the first Black man to shoot a cover for British Vogue in 104 years. In no time, Harriman was photographing top celebrities — Kate Winslet, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Rhianna, Lewis Hamilton, and of course, the Royal Family. Alongside, he made his directorial debut with his short film about grief and healing, ‘The After’, which earned an Oscar nomination, last year. “My career has been so rocket-ship-like,” says Harriman, at the recently held Ajyal Film Festival by the Doha Film Institute in Qatar. “I guess I could have just been the guy who shot the Vogue cover and then GQ Man of the Year. I could have been running from yacht to castle to afterparty, from Cannes to Venice. But what would I tell my daughters, when they become young women? That I was just doing that when the world was burning? That it was enough just to accumulate wealth and fame in an industry unfortunately becoming more vacuous in its nature?” Harriman punctuates his measured dialogue with a deep breath. “My heroes are artists who know what the job of an artist is, like Nina Simone. As she said, your work as an artist is to reflect the times. Muhammad Ali lost four years of his best fighting shape because he believed in something,” he says of his heroes, who risked so much to speak truth to power.
Focussing largely on underrepresented voices and stories, Harriman’s photographs have shed light on various humanitarian issues; from the hunger crisis in North Africa to the migrant crisis in Sicily. “When there’s injustice, I turn my lens towards it and do what I can to help,” he says. “A big part of my success is failure. ” The spirit of fail, fail, until you don’t fail anymore, is a cornerstone of Harriman’s triumph. Far from home, a deeply sensitive boy from Nigeria went to boarding school in the English countryside. Grappling neurodivergence and dyslexia, Harriman’s childhood was fraught with self-doubt, lacking in self-belief, bereft of self-love.
In his TED Talk, Harriman had reminisced thus: “The classroom was impossibly slow. My brain was not capable of assimilating how they were teaching me. So for a big part of my life, I was ashamed of my own mind. And if I’m being honest, I was ashamed of myself.” He credits the Internet, “an endless library of the extraordinary”, for eventually saving him.The life-altering turnaround though was when Harriman’s wife Camilla gifted him a camera on his 40th birthday, only seven years ago. “She fell in love with all the parts of my mind I was ashamed of,” the self-taught photographer says, “The moment she took away that shame and looked beyond my anxiety, I was able to do things that a few photographers have done in a lifetime. That’s because my mind is different. ”Quoting iconic photographer Robert Frank — “The eye should learn to listen before it looks” — Harriman says, “My eye, throughout the trials and tribulations of my life, has been listening to the human condition. So once someone puts that tool in my hand (the camera), I know exactly when the decisive moment is. That’s possibly why the protest images that I took stood out. ”How exactly did Harriman establish that connection with the sea of crowds at the BLM protests? “I’m shooting my own trauma,” he says. “You know what it’s like to look at a black man who is utterly broken? I recognise his invisible scars. He gives me that look because he sees me and says, ‘Take my pain. Take it, hold it for me, and let the world see it’. And that’s exactly what I did.” Analysing the mystery behind why those images turned out so powerful, Harriman says human beings react to what they feel.
“There’s this trust, this transference of little pieces of pain that I unfortunately recognise. It’s like carrying a little puppy and you can feel its beating heart. I have that frozen in time. The images just went viral by themselves,” he says. A greater purpose to visual storytelling has been the North Star to Harriman’s journey. “I wasn’t interested in sending it to the wire and having my pictures reflect the rage culture that newspaper editors love,” he says. “I was 42 when I started doing this. So I wasn’t a baby. I understood the history of civil rights imagery. If I was going to do it, I was going to follow in the footsteps of Moneta Sleet Jr. or Gordon Parks (photographers of the American civil rights movement). We have to decide to decolonise our minds and look for the truth. In today’s world, simply telling the truth has become a revolutionary act.”
Among a dozen things, Harriman is also a mental health campaigner, an ambassador for Save the Children, and the founder of Culture3 whose mission is to explore what web 3.0 means for culture, commerce, and society. “To the mothers and fathers and the kids that are dealing with neurodivergent kids, I want to be a living, breathing example of the idea that maybe kids with different minds can actually give us the answers we need in this broken world,” Harriman says. “Wear your vulnerability with pride. It is what makes us human.”
