In October 1967, when the body of Che Guevara was brought out of the Bolivian jungle lashed to a helicopter, Brian Moser was the first photographer on hand in Vallegrande to take what became iconic pictures of Latin America’s most famous revolutionary leader.
A week later, the trial began in nearby Camiri of Régis Debray, the French Marxist intellectual who had been captured after visiting the rebels, and Brian was there to film it, smuggling Debray a note with a message from Fidel Castro.
In 1985, when the remains of Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor of the Auschwitz death camp, were found in Brazil, Brian was there to interview the Austrian couple who had sheltered him and who still talked approvingly of the need to eliminate the untermenschen, the Jews. The footage formed part of the film The Search for Mengele, narrated by David Frost.
Brian, who has died aged 88 of heart complications, was not only present to record key moments in Latin America’s recent history, but he was also a documentary film-maker who pioneered a groundbreaking series for Granada TV called Disappearing World. The award-winning series, which began in 1970 and ran for more than 20 years, told the stories of indigenous peoples under threat from the advance of the outside world, in their own words.
His 1967 film on Che Guevara, End of a Revolution, shown by Granada’s World in Action series, refuted the official version that Guevara had died in a gunbattle. Brian’s version, that Guevara was captured alive and then killed, was based on a tipoff from a member of the American special forces who were present in the jungle region where Guevara and his guerrillas were trying to start a peasant revolution. The film, made by Brian with the help of his wife Caroline, turned them into objects of suspicion for the CIA.
Brian studied geology at Cambridge University, and then spent two years in Colombia with the anthropologist Donald Tayler, recording the music of eight remote indigenous tribes, the beginning of his long love affair with South America, and particularly Colombia. The film he made caught the attention of the Granada TV programme controller Denis Forman, who decided to invest in the amateur film-maker, providing training and then hiring him to work on World in Action.
In 1967 he married the anthropologist Caroline Shephard and they spent several years in Latin America, where together they developed the idea of the Disappearing World films.
Caroline says “There were two guiding principles – first, we would work with anthropologists who worked with tribal groups to give us access. Second, they would tell their stories in their own language and words, with subtitles, with little or no commentary, a revolutionary departure from the usual custom of having a presenter, invariably a white male.”
Disappearing World became a landmark anthropological series, internationally acclaimed, offering intimate portraits of remote communities, like the Cuiva, Embera and Panare of South America but also the nomadic Tuareg of the Sahara, the Kurdish Dervishes and the Meo of Laos. Each episode was filmed on 16mm film, usually taking about four weeks. A three-month edit in the Granada studios in Manchester followed. For Forman, Disappearing World and Coronation Street were two of the best series Granada ever made: both were commercially successful.
In 1976 Brian moved to Central TV and made the series Frontier, exploring the lives of people living on the edge of society. For the first episode, the couple and their two small children lived for months in a tiny bamboo hut built above a swamp in a slum community in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
In 1982 Brian and Caroline divorced and he later married the Colombian soprano Marina Tafur and spent most of the next few years in her home country. Because of his work recording and documenting indigenous peoples he was made an honorary citizen of Colombia, regarded as a pioneer of visual anthropology. Many of his sound recordings and photos are held there, while others are at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford and at the British Museum.
Brian was born in London. His father, Charlie Moser, was a Jewish businessman whose family, originally from Germany, were successful wool merchants in Bradford. His mother, Eliza (nee Henderson), grew up in Chile, where her family ran an export-import business, sending her to Britain for her education. In London she became an artist.
Brian said that when he was nine years old he would catch the No 11 bus from his home in Chelsea to a cinema in Victoria where they showed newsreels of the war and he saw pictures of Belsen concentration camp being liberated. “Perhaps it was the ability of those images to tell such a powerful story that sowed the seeds of my future career.” He saw the films he made for Disappearing World as “telling the stories of ordinary people often struggling for survival and frequently fighting for their rights”.
Brian was charismatic, charming, risk-taking. He loved the rainforest; he hated urban life. He spent his last few years living in a cottage in Dorset, organising his huge collection of photos into a book with the help of his son Titus.
He is survived by Marina, Titus and Nat, his grandchildren, Tage, Kaia, Sebastian, Savva and Elinor, his stepchildren Juanita and Sandra, and his sister, Leonora.
• Brian John Moser, documentary film-maker, born 30 January 1935; died 16 February 2023
