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My older brother Noel Chanan, a documentary film editor and photographer, who has died aged 86, trained at the BBC in his 20s and worked on the pioneering current affairs programme Tonight in the early 1960s. Then in 1966, he left to go freelance and set up his own cutting room.

Noel was in constant demand as a film editor and he also directed a number of modest but elegant films of his own, particularly on photography. These included contributions to Granada Television’s Camera: Early Photography series in 1979 and film biographies of contemporary photographers including Bert Hardy, George Rodger and David Goldblatt.

As a photographer himself, Noel was particularly good at portraiture and over the years took remarkable photos of cultural figures including Pierre Boulez and Isaiah Berlin, and especially of the artist Leonard Baskin, with whom he became close friends, and through him, the poet Ted Hughes. Several of Noel’s photos are now held by the National Portrait Gallery, the Bodleian Library and the University of Exeter. In 2009 he recovered a conversation he had recorded in 1983 between Baskin and Hughes, and made a film, The Artist and the Poet, about their collaboration.

Noel was born in London, the eldest of the three sons of Elchanan Chanan, a small businessman, and his wife, Miriam. The seeds of his future career were sown in his teens when he was given an 8mm Paillard-Bolex camera for his barmitzvah. After leaving Hendon grammar school, he went to Ealing College to study photography and then in 1962 joined the BBC as a trainee film editor.

On 22 November 1963, our family was gathering for the Friday evening meal when he rang from the Tonight offices to say: “In case you haven’t heard, Kennedy’s been assassinated and I’m not coming home until further notice.”

In 1966, Noel met June Stanier, who shared his passion for photography. They married two years later, around the time she became picture editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

In the 1970s, Noel and I worked together when he edited and/or produced some of my first films for television. He worked on more films than I could keep up with, and would phone to let me know when one he was particularly proud of was going to be screened – among these were a film on the conquest of Everest, a couple of films with Malcolm Muggeridge and a series on the Algerian war.

When he retired from editing in about 2000 and moved to Devon, Noel concentrated on photography. He had three solo exhibitions, including one at the Atelier Gallery at Exeter University, and assembled a great collection of books and documents on the history of film and photography.

He also wrote about forgotten English pioneers, including a monograph on William, Earl of Craven, published in 2006, and another in 2013 on John Dillwyn Llewelyn. He was in the process of preparing another book when he succumbed to Alzheimer’s and was unable to see it through.

June died in 2018. Noel is survived by his younger brothers, Gabriel and me.