Son of a German refugee and a Turkish father hounded for years by J. Edgar Hoover on suspicion of espionage, 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, much of it playing piano for the wandering Too Much Brothers magic act. 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.
After recovering from two years of paraplegia brought on by a spinal cord tumor, in 1988-9 Brian made a series of illegal border crossings into Burma to film Lines of Fire, a documentary about revolution and heroin trafficking. Though the film’s greatest cinematic achievement was making revolution and heroin trafficking boring, it nonetheless premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is in the permanent film collection, and was selected as the opening night film for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences annual documentary series. Despite having been sentenced to death in absentia on bogus, retaliatory espionage charges (the best film review anyone ever received) Brian and his cameraman, Marcus Birsel, snuck into Burma again on a Greenpeace mission to document rainforest destruction and assist in the mass reproduction of his documentary for free distribution inside Burma. They were captured by a platoon of junta troops in the jungle, from whom they had the nerve-wracking pleasure of escaping. The next year Brian was an assistant director on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. He is an Airline Transport rated pilot with about 3000 hours of flight time, of which 2000 hours are in tailwheel aircraft. He was a competition aerobatic pilot and later 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 while en route two days later a second message said to ignore the first — the flood had spared 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 Agfa transparency shot in 1982, were infected by mold.
Brian lives in Grafton, Vermont where he serves as 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. You owe your dog the truth.).
Brian would be glad to hear how you’re holding up or to know how he may be of assistance to you at photowallah@brianbeker.com