Yannis Behrakis (Greek: Γιάννης Μπεχράκης) (born 1960), is a Greek photojournalist and Chief Photographer of Reuters.
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Yannis Behrakis was born in 1960 in Athens, Greece. He studied photography in the Athens School of Arts and Technology and received his BA (Honours) from Middlesex University. He worked as a studio photographer in Athens in 1985-86. In 1987 he started work for Reuters and in late 1988 he was offered a staff job with the agency based in Athens. His first foreign assignment was to cover Libya crisis on January 1989. Since then he documented a variety of events including the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, the changes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the civil conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, the wars in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Afghanistan, Lebanon the first and second Gulf wars the Arab Spring in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. He has also covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years, earthquakes in Kashmir, Turkey, Greece and Iran and major news events around the world. He has also covered four Summer Olympics, the 1994 World Cup in the US and many international sports events. He has moved with Reuters in Jerusalem as the chief photographer for Israel and the Palestinian Territories in 2008/9. in 2010 he moved back in Greece to cover the financial crisis. He has taken part in many group exhibitions in Athens, Thessaloniki, London, Edinburgh, New York, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid and Dubai while he has presented solo exhibitions as well.
In 2000, Yannis Behrakis was wounded in the ambush in Sierra Leone where the American reporter Kurt Schork and Spanish cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of Associated Press Television were killed.[1] He and the, also wounded, South African cameraman Mark Chisholm managed to get away from the attackers and survive, thing which later attributed to the grueling hostile-environment training they had had five years earlier.[2]
He has also won in 2004 and 2009 awards in the China International Press Photo Contest.