In the 1960s, Harrison worked as a photographer's assistant at
Vogue. Harrison was a founding trustee of the English Stained Glass Museum, located at Ely Cathedral, and curator of its collection from 1975 to 1980. He has curated exhibitions at the
Victoria and Albert Museum and
National Portrait Gallery in London, and others in Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Germany, where he co-curated a Bacon exhibition in 2006 at the
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in
Düsseldorf. He contributed an essay to the catalogue of the Bacon centennial
retrospective exhibition shown in 2008–2009 at
Tate Britain, the
Prado in Madrid and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Photography Harrison's 1998 book
Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965 is a broad survey, also discussing fashion photography; its title is a reference to
Jonathan Aitken's 1967 book
The Young Meteors, and popularized the term, now commonly applied to that group of photographers. Harrison encouraged
Lillian Bassman to republish her fashion photography years after she had given up in disgust. He also edited
Early Color, a collection of the photography of
Saul Leiter, and prepared the work of
Ron Traeger for exhibition. and on Bacon’s life and his milieu, beginning with
Points of Reference in 1999. In 2016, following ten years of research, Harrison completed the catalogue raisonneé of Bacon’s paintings, published in five volumes by The Estate of Francis Bacon. Harrison has edited and curated several volumes of essays and criticism on Bacon, and
Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, published by the Estate in association with
Thames & Hudson. Harrison's writings on Bacon emphasize the importance to the artist's work of cinema and the photographs, often torn from magazines, that Bacon collected and referred to when working.
Peter Conrad praised ‘the careful investigation and deft criticism’ of his
In Camera: Francis Bacon, concluding that it was "an opulent, paradoxically beautiful book". ==Selected publications==