www.silverguide.site –

It has been a hectic few weeks for Misan Harriman. When we meet, he has just returned from New York, where he hosted screenings of a new documentary about his work as an activist and photographer of protests, Shoot the People. While there, the 48-year-old got to soak in the glorious chaos of the New York Knicks’ victory parade.

“I’ve never seen New York like that: all colours, all shapes, and sizes,” says Harriman, who had not been to the city since he was a child. For him, the parade – in which 2 million people took to the streets to celebrate the basketball team’s first NBA championship win in 53 years – complements his incredibly popular protest photography.

If there have been people in the street making noise about something over the past six years, chances are Harriman will have been there with his camera, shooting black and white portraits. “Grenfell, Black Lives Matter, queer, trans, climate protests, many wars: Gaza, Sudan, Congo,” he says. “It’s all there.” Much of it appears on his Instagram, where he has more than half a million followers.

But Harriman is far more than photographs. A cultural figure with clout, he uses his platform to talk about the issues that matter to him: the conflict in Gaza and the lack of action on the climate crisis. Almost every day he posts a video of himself on social media, close up to the camera, giving a take on topical issues, often in his study, his face framed by his trademark thick-rimmed black glasses.

But his passion for communicating his political views online, combined with his role as chair of London’s biggest arts complex, the Southbank Centre, has brought him some unwelcome attention. In the past few months, Harriman has been a regular target of negative coverage in the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and GB News – publications that have questioned whether he is the right person to lead the 75-year-old institution.

Just a few hours after we meet, they get their wish: Harriman announces that he will stand down as chair in the autumn, rather than seek a third term. The decision was taken in January, he tells me; the delay in announcing it was due to “internal processes” within the arts organisation. When I ask the Southbank Centre, a spokesperson insists it has nothing to do with the row. But publications such as the Telegraph are celebrating his resignation as a win.

This has all taken a toll, Harriman says. He is worried for his family: online abuse has ratcheted up. There have been death threats, he says. “I’m very visible, and this is an age where it takes one person who has been force-fed a single story about me … that could end up in a very scary, dangerous place.”

You couldn’t tell this is a man under pressure from looking at him. He turns up to our interview at the Groucho, a private members’ club in London, with his two Leica cameras slung across his shoulders, and quickly leads me to an air-conditioned bar. He slides off his walking boots as we begin to speak.

I am fascinated by Harriman. On paper he seems like the most unlikely of revolutionary voices. Why did the son of a billionaire, who had a successful career as a City headhunter, pack it in for a life of running around protests? And who, or more accurately what, exactly is Harriman? An artist, activist, celebrity … influencer?

Harriman’s backstory and family history is – as he points out – worthy of a separate film. His father, Chief Hope Harriman, was a Cambridge-educated industrialist who made his fortune in post-independence Nigeria. His uncle was Leslie Harriman, an Oxford-educated diplomat who served as chairman of the special committee against apartheid at the UN – rubbing shoulders with Muhammad Ali.

Harriman was sent from Nigeria to boarding school in England, at the now-defunct Stubbington House (he then went on to Bradfield College). His memories of Stubbington, which was known for its connections to the Royal Navy and for educating one of Queen Victoria’s grandsons, are not rose-tinted. “It was properly draconian,” he says. “I think we had showers twice a week? Shorts in the winter term, without fail.”

Despite his family’s wealth, Harriman says his mother ensured he and his siblings didn’t grow up to be spoilt little rich kids. “She always raised me to recognise how lucky I was,” says Harriman. “You say my surname in Nigeria, it’s not a small deal. She was very aware of that and made sure we knew we couldn’t walk on air.” Still, there are hints that his life was far from ordinary. When I ask him where he went on holidays he tells me there were trips to Disneyland and safaris in Kenya: “Normal stuff, you know.”

His uncle’s brushes with the major players in the anti-apartheid world also left an impression. “Uncle Leslie was doing extraordinary things,” he says. “He knew Steve Biko. We saw that and I think that left a mark on me as I got older.”

But Harriman didn’t become an activist immediately. As a young man, he did what many wealthy kids do: moved to London and got a job in the City. He was a recruiter; a headhunter. Yet he knew something was missing. He was turning up to work every day, earning good money, but dreaming of doing something else. “I have spent my life obsessed with the moving image,” he tells me. “Anyone that knows me will tell you how bored they would be of me talking about how amazing the lighting was in [Stanley Kubrick’s] Barry Lyndon.” At heart, he says, he was a frustrated artist.

Then he met his wife, Camilla, who thrust a camera into his hand just after he’d turned 40 and told him to stop talking about other artists and make some art of his own. He started small, with pictures of their two daughters. Then came Black Lives Matter.

His first viral moment was an image of England hockey player Darcy Bourne holding a sign that said: “Why is ending racism a debate?” It was shared thousands of times online and became emblematic of a moment in history when a conversation about race and anti-Black racism was being forced into the public domain.

Then things really took off. In August 2020, British Vogue – edited by its first Black editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful – announced that Harriman would be the first Black male photographer to shoot a cover of the magazine (Nadine Ijewere was the first Black photographer, in 2018). And not just any cover, but the September issue, the most important one of the year. The cover featured the footballer Marcus Rashford and the model Adwoa Aboah with the tagline “Activism now”. Like the Bourne image, it seemed to speak to a change that was happening in Britain.

He was handpicked by the Sussexes, Meghan and Harry, to shoot their family portraits in 2021; shortly afterwards, he was announced as chair of the Southbank Centre; then, in 2024, he received an Oscar nomination for his first short film. Five years earlier he had been a frustrated recruiter who taught himself photography from YouTube tutorials. Now he was becoming one of the most prominent Black figures in British culture.

The unlikely nature of his rise is something he wrestles with during Shoot the People. “I’ve somehow managed to tiptoe around the minefield of being a visible voice and a Black voice in a Britain that usually allows a very specific type of noise to come out of the mouths of someone that has the same hue as me,” he muses at one point.

But is there a big mystery here? Isn’t an obvious part of his success down to his class background? This is a man who knew the Sussexes socially before he photographed them; he moved in the same circles as Enninful, too. Other Black photographers – including Charlie Phillips, Vanley Burke, Jennie Baptiste, Campbell Addy and Clement Cooper – have bags of talent, but they were not chosen to shoot that Vogue cover. Clearly, those class connections matter; they open doors in Britain.

“Yeah,” says Harriman. “But you’re speaking like they were giving me opportunities because they had met me.” Well, I say, I’m implying that’s part of the reason. Harriman is having none of it.

“There’s no way that anyone would take a risk on giving me a September issue of anything if, for maybe two or three months preceding that, [my pictures] weren’t the most shared images on the planet,” he says.

Did he think he was ready for a Vogue cover? “Great editors know talent when they see it,” Harriman says. “And Edward never questioned himself in making that choice. Lots of people get big chances, but it’s what you do when the door is open that counts.”

The fact that so many people have engaged with him and his views has riled certain sections of the British establishment. Since May, Harriman has been in the middle of a firestorm about his social media posts. It started with a piece in the Telegraph, which accused him of sharing a post that contained a “conspiracy theory” about the Golders Green attack in April, because it questioned what he believed to be the lesser amount of coverage given to the Muslim victim, Ishmail Hussein. (Essa Suleiman, who will stand trial next year, is accused of attempting to murder Hussein, a friend of his, at Hussein’s flat in Southwark, south-east London, before travelling to Golders Green in north London and attempting to murder Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine, who were wearing clothing typical of the Orthodox Jewish community, on the street.)

Critics of Harriman said the repost risked minimising the antisemitic nature of the attack. The Times called for him to resign from the Southbank Centre. Even some broadly supportive commentators have pointed out it was hardly a “wise or insightful comment” coming at a time of heightened tensions over antisemitism. But Harriman stands by his initial post about Golders Green, pointing out that others – including Mehdi Hasan – had made the same argument. It wasn’t only him, but many people online “who just want the same level of reporting for all victims”, he says.

Then, the day after the UK local election results in May, in which the Reform party made significant gains, Harriman quoted Susan Sontag in a video. “She said, when thinking about the Holocaust,” he said, “10% of people in any population are cruel no matter what, and 10% are merciful no matter what, and the other – this is important – the other remaining 80% could be moved in either direction. It’s such a profound way to look at us. In the context of yesterday’s election result, it is something which I think is really topical.”

Harriman’s detractors didn’t feel the same way. A Times editorial called his comments “distasteful in the extreme”; Reform’s Robert Jenrick called Harriman a “crass moron [who] should be nowhere near a taxpayer-funded organisation”. Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, asked: “How on earth could yesterday’s election results ever be comparable to the Holocaust?”

Does he see why using that quote could cause offence to an already marginalised group of people? “That statement has been used by many people, including me, in the past, to talk about how communities behave,” he argues. “It’s in the public domain as a great quote to use when talking about our behaviour in general.”

A group of more than 60 MPs and peers wrote to culture secretary Lisa Nandy, asking the government to open an investigation into Harriman’s behaviour. In response, she told Arts Council England and the Charity Commission to look into how the Southbank Centre was handling the situation.

Greta Thunberg, Tracey Emin and Gary Lineker – and Jewish figures including Sontag’s biographer, the Pulitzer prize-winner Benjamin Moser – then signed an open letter decrying what they called a “dishonest smear campaign” against Harriman in the press. An online pledge of support for Harriman garnered more than 100,000 signatures.

It’s worth noting that while the vast majority of chairs of cultural organisations stay away from any potentially controversial comments, others do make political points: Nicholas Serota warned about the impact of Brexit while heading Arts Council England, and George Osborne, chair of the British Museum, has made his feelings clear about cryptocurrency and AI. Granted, crypto isn’t as fraught as Gaza, but many chairs are not only silent stewards. The outrage machine, say Harriman’s supporters, only cranks into gear for certain people.

Then, in early June, Harriman posted on Instagram about the mass protests in Albania that have been sparked by Jared Kushner’s and Ivanka Trump’s proposals for a luxury resort on a nature reserve in the south of the country. The Telegraph reported that he had reposted unfounded allegations that the couple’s business interests involved “selling off the Albanian coastline to Jewish billionaires and [an] Israeli military project”. The post has since been removed.

When asked about it, Harriman says: “The fact that Jared Kushner is a Jewish millionaire and does a lot of business with Israel is a verbatim fact … If someone is trying to twist that into me again being antisemitic, that is part of a smear campaign.” Harriman says the Telegraph failed to report on two other videos he posted about Albania, in which he said that Saudis and Qataris were also purchasing property in the country. (Harriman has an official complaint pending against the Daily Mail, the Times, the Telegraph and the Express via the Independent Press Standards Organisation.)

Harriman’s posts were under the microscope after the press articles in May. It is staggering that he considered it a good idea to repost something without meticulously checking the language, especially as he claims his online activity was being “stalked”. But, speaking to him about the reposts, he genuinely believes he’s done nothing wrong. The Kushner post was shared by thousands of people, he says. But those people weren’t in the middle of a row about social media posting and accusations of poor judgment while chair of the Southbank Centre. Wouldn’t a smarter move have been to get off the internet for a few days?

“I’ve always used my voice online,” he says. “The moment I used my voice for the grace and humanity of Muslims and children suffering bombardment, suddenly, the rightwing papers had an issue with it. It’s as clear as day.”

There’s another obvious fact about Harriman: he is one of the only senior Black figures at British cultural institutions. After we speak he messages me, quoting a piece by the Voice that says he is “occupying institutional space while refusing to become politically mute in exchange for acceptance”. This “spells out” the issue, he says. He points to the Reginald D Hunter prosecution by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which was thrown out by a judge in December who said the group’s aim was “to have him cancelled”. Harriman believes his treatment has been even worse.

He will depart the Southbank Centre in the autumn, but there are no signs of him slowing down. Harriman tells me there’s another film in the works and a TV series that he is sworn to secrecy about. The promotional train for Shoot the People rolls on.

After we speak, he posts a video criticising his treatment in the press, and speaks at a Hacked Off event alongside Hugh Grant. Several other videos appear, covering everything from drone strikes on aid workers in Sudan to African teams’ progress at the World Cup. The conversation and controversy around him continues; thousands engage with it.

It seems that despite the background noise, many people are keen to listen.

• Shoot the People is in UK and Irish cinemas now, and is streaming in the US on Watermelon+.

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.