Steele-Perkins was born in
Rangoon, Burma, on 28 July 1947, to a British father and a Burmese mother; but his father left his mother and took the boy to England at the age of two. He grew up in
Burnham-on-Sea. He went to
Christ's Hospital and for one year studied chemistry at the
University of York before leaving for a stay in Canada. Returning to Britain, he joined the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he served as photographer and picture editor for a student magazine. After graduating in psychology in 1970 he started to work as a freelance photographer, specializing in the theatre, while he also lectured in psychology. By 1971, Steele-Perkins had moved to London and become a full-time photographer, with particular interest in urban issues, including poverty. He went to
Bangladesh in 1973 to take photographs for relief organizations; some of this work was exhibited in 1974 at the Camerawork Gallery (London). In 1973–74, he taught photography at the Stanhope Institute and the
North East London Polytechnic. had led to a commission by the
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to increase the scale of their work, and in six years they produced 30,000 photographs as well as many hours of taped interviews. This led to the 1982 book,
Survival Programmes. Steele-Perkins' work included depiction from 1975 to 1977 of street festivals, and prints from
London Street Festivals were bought by the
British Council and exhibited with
Homer Sykes'
Once a Year and
Patrick Ward's
Wish You Were Here; Steele-Perkins' depiction of
Notting Hill has been described as being in the vein of
Tony Ray-Jones. Steele-Perkins became an associate of the French agency
Viva in 1976, and three years after this, he published his first book,
The Teds, an examination of
teddy boys that is now considered a classic of documentary and even fashion photography. He curated photographs for the
Arts Council collection, and co-edited a collection of these,
About 70 Photographs. In 1977, he made a brief detour into "conceptual" photography, working with the photographer
Mark Edwards to collect images from the ends of rolls of
35mm film taken by themselves and others. (These were exposures taken immediately after loading a fresh film and without focusing or aiming, in order to wind along the fogged film leader and ensure that the film in position for the first wanted exposure was unfogged.) Forty were exhibited in "Film Ends". Work documenting poverty in Britain took Steele-Perkins to
Belfast, which he found to be poorer than
Glasgow,
London,
Middlesbrough, or
Newcastle, as well as experiencing "a low-intensity war". Of his experiences in Northern Ireland, he was quoted as saying:
"I intended to cover the situation from the standpoint of the underdog, the downtrodden: I was not neutral and was not interested in capturing it so... I began to see that my work in Northern Ireland had always been a celebration of the resilience and unyielding way that the Catholic community resisted." He stayed in the Catholic
Lower Falls area, first
squatting and then living in the flat of a man he met in Belfast. His photographs of Northern Ireland appeared in a 1981 book written by
Wieland Giebel. Thirty years later, he returned to the area to find that its residents had new problems and fears; the later photographs appear within
Magnum Ireland. He continued to work in Britain, taking photographs published as
The Pleasure Principle, an examination (in colour) of life in Britain but also a reflection of himself. With
Peter Marlow, he successfully pushed for the opening of a London office for Magnum; the proposal was approved in 1986. Steele-Perkins made four trips to
Afghanistan in the 1990s, sometimes staying with the
Taliban, the majority of whom "were just ordinary guys" who treated him courteously. Together with
James Nachtwey and others, he was also fired on, prompting him to reconsider his priorities: in addition to the danger of the front line: . . . you never get good pictures out of it. I've yet to see a decent front-line war picture. All the strong stuff is a bit further back, where the emotions are. A book of his black and white images,
Afghanistan, was published first in French, and later in English and in Japanese. The review in the
Spectator read in part: The book and the travelling exhibition of photographs were also reviewed favorably in the
Guardian, Observer, Library Journal, and London
Evening Standard. Steele-Perkins served as the President of Magnum from 1995 to 1998. One of the annual meetings over which he presided was that of 1996, to which
Russell Miller was given unprecedented access as an outsider and which Miller has described in some detail. With his second wife the
presenter and writer
Miyako Yamada (), whom he married in 1999, Steele-Perkins had spent much time in Japan, publishing two books of photographs:
Fuji, a collection of views and glimpses of the mountain inspired by
Hokusai's
Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji; and
Tokyo Love Hello, scenes of life in the city. Between these two books he also published a personal visual diary of the year 2001,
Echoes. Work in
South Korea included a contribution to a
Hayward Gallery touring exhibition of photographs of contemporary slavery, "Documenting Disposable People", in which Steele-Perkins interviewed and made black-and-white photographs of Korean "
comfort women". "Their eyes were really important to me: I wanted them to look at you, and for you to look at them", he wrote. "They're not going to be around that much longer, and it was important to give this show a history." The photographs were published within
Documenting Disposable People: Contemporary Global Slavery. Steele-Perkins returned to England for a project by the
Side Gallery on Durham's closed coalfields (exhibited within "Coalfield Stories"); after this work ended, he stayed on to work on a depiction (in black and white) of life in the north-east of England, published as
Northern Exposures. In 2008, Steele-Perkins won an
Arts Council England grant for "Carers: The Hidden Face of Britain", a project to interview those caring for their relatives at home, and to photograph the relationships. Some of this work has appeared in
The Guardian, and also in his book
England, My England, a compilation of four decades of his photography that combines photographs taken for publication with much more personal work: he does not see himself as having a separate personality when at home. "By turns gritty and evocative," wrote a reviewer in
The Guardian, "it is a book one imagines that Orwell would have liked very much." His archive will be held with the Bodleian Libraries. Steele-Perkins had two sons, Cedric, born 16 November 1990, and Cameron, born 18 June 1992. With his marriage to
Miyako Yamada, he had a stepson, Daisuke and a granddaughter, Momoe. He died in Japan on 8 September 2025, at the age of 78. ==Publications==