Son of a German refugee and a Turkish father hounded for years on suspicion of espionage by J. Edgar Hoover, Brian was born in New York City in 1958. He taught himself photography in high school and while working on a Manhattan newspaper in college and lived there until graduating from Columbia Journalism School in 1982, after which he immediately got as far away as possible on a two-week trip that turned into a year in south Asia. He returned to travel and live there for many years, ignoring what wiser heads might have taken as a sign when he was crushed under an overturned Willy’s Jeep in 1985 in the Himalayan foothills near Kathmandu.
In 1988-9 he made a series of illegal border crossings into Burma to film Lines of Fire, a documentary about revolution and heroin trafficking. The film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is in the permanent film collection there. He returned to Burma to document forest destruction for Greenpeace and the next year was an assistant director on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. Brian is an Airline Transport rated pilot with about 3000 hours of flight time, of which 2000 hours are in tailwheel aircraft, and he operated an open-cockpit biplane ride company in Santa Monica.
In 2019, while camping in remote Montana mountains with an especially vicious foster dog, he received a text message alerting him to a flood in the Asheville facility where his photographic archives were stored. It would take many days to haul a camper out of the mountains and across the country, but a second message two days later said to ignore the first — the flood had not affected that space. It would be another two years before emptying it and learning that the moisture from the flood had destroyed about two-thirds of Brian’s 40-year photo archive. Selects from what remains are on this site. The rest, like this one, were infected by mold.
Brian lives in Grafton, Vermont where he serves as personal chef and mouse safari guide for Pokey, the best dog in the world (so if you’re in the habit of telling your dog that she’s the best dog in the world you might consider amending that to second best, if you feel you owe your dog the truth.).
Brian would be glad to hear how you’re holding up at photowallah@brianbeker.com