Article

Richard Harrington

Published Online February 7, 2008

Last Edited March 4, 2015

Richard Harrington, photographer-writer (b at Hamburg, Ger 24 Feb 1911; d at Toronto, 11 Dec 2005). Harrington began photography in 1940 when he was working as an X-ray technician in Toronto and was asked to make slides for doctors. A few years later he became a full-time freelance photographer-writer.
Grain Elevators
Southern Alberta (photo by Richard Harrington).


Often working in collaboration with his author-wife Lyn, he travelled extensively, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Albania to Zaire. He had a special interest in indigenous peoples, and probably his best-known and most moving photo essay was done in the Arctic in the late 1940s, documenting a band of nomadic Inuit and their struggle for survival after the annual caribou migration changed course and bypassed them. Harrington published upwards of 2400 photo stories, and his work appeared in more than 24 books, including The Family of Man (1955), The Inuit: Life As It Was (1981), Richard Harrington's Yukon (1974) and River Rafting in Canada (1984). His photographs were purchased by the National Archives of Canada, the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art (New York City). He was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001.