John Benton-Harris, who has died aged 83, was a US street photographer best known for his photo essays of the English. His output was prolific – by his own calculation, between 1960 and 2006, he shot nearly 2.5m images – and he believed that what he knew, thought and felt was no less important than what he saw. He always worked to reveal something of his own experience in the moments he captured with his camera.

His solo exhibitions included Old Masters Were Young Once at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the show that launched him in 1971; England, St Patrick’s Day, Streets of NYC, at the Photographers Gallery, 1981; and Out for the Day, at the Midland Arts Centre in 1997.

He was part of the group show Derby Day 200 at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1979, and also co-curated two major photographic exhibitions for the Barbican, American Images: Photography 1945 to 1980 (1985) and Through the Looking Glass (1989).

Benton-Harris was particularly interested in the people who attended St Patrick’s Day celebrations in his native New York, and returned repeatedly to photograph them. A collection of these images was published in 2019 as St Patrick’s People, one of five small-format books recently issued by Cafe Royal that also included The English (2018), Walking New York 1961-1981 (2020) and Walking London 1965-1988 (2021).

Other projects included Americans in Europe, exhibited at the Santa Fe Centre for Photography in 1983; and Children of the Troubles, shot in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. A good selection of his work from England and New York was published in Creative Camera Collection 5 in 1978, and he was supportive in the research for and the making of the 2019 film Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay, about the founder of Creative Camera magazine.

Benton-Harris preferred to work outside the editorial establishment, as a freelance rather than in staff jobs or for an agency. He never really enjoyed being told what to do by a commissioning editor, and preferred to work things out for himself.

He was born in the Bronx, New York, one of 12 children of James Harris, a grocery clerk, and his wife, Mary (nee Rowan). Originally wanting to be a pilot or an actor, John found his calling as a photographer after seeing Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955. He adopted as his professional name the double-barrelled Benton-Harris to make his surname more distinctive

Having started his career as an industrial photographer with the Sinclair Oil Corporation, Benton-Harris began studying the following year at Alexey Brodovitch’s influential Design Laboratory classes, with sessions and late-night conversations held by “the Brod” in an off-Broadway automat and at Richard Avedon’s Upper East Side studio. Brodovitch would always stress the importance of self-discovery and remind his students not to imitate others.

Brodovitch’s students also included at various times Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, and Benton-Harris’s close friend Tony Ray-Jones, with whom he shared a New York apartment and a photographic philosophy. Both would have an approach in mind when something interesting started to develop before their cameras, and had a kindness about them, with a rich visual language to express their ideas.

In 1963 Benton-Harris received his draft papers for military service. He was posted to San Pedro, California, after basic training, and then to Vicenza, Italy, as a US army photographer. In 1965, he took leave to cover the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill in the UK, where he met Jane Gaffney. The couple married the following year and Benton-Harris settled permanently in London, working as a staff photographer for the short-lived London Life magazine, which concentrated on capturing the cool of the swinging 60s.

From London he began his pilgrimage around England, and developed a visual passion for the country that would never leave him, though he was also convinced that the English never cared for photography as much as he did, especially the art establishment, whom he believed were “always busy seeking newness”.

After working for various publications, he gave up on calling himself a photojournalist, and instead referred to himself as a “visual sociologist”. He had come to believe that photojournalism was long dead in the US, and had never existed in the UK where, he thought, magazines did not treat the photographer as anything approaching an equal.

Benton-Harris was a teacher and a visiting lecturer on photographic courses at a variety of institutions, including Trent Polytechnic (Nottingham Trent University) in the 70s, the School of Documentary Photography in Newport, south Wales in the 70s and 80s, and latterly the London College of Printing (later the London College of Communication, UAL). In 1987 he was appointed adjunct professor of photography at the University of Michigan.

His critique of his pupils’ work was ruthless, but never personal, as I found out myself, as a student on the photojournalism course at the LCC in 1995. The work ethic was hard: shooting every day, developing your film, and then printing contact sheets in the darkroom for a late afternoon appraisal. JBH, as he was affectionately known to his students, would welcome you into his office, with his alluring South Bronx accent, wearing what looked like a pair of welding goggles, but were magnifying glass lenses attached to a leather-lined headband, to cast critical eyes over your contact sheets, with a red chinagraph pencil in hand.

He once tore up my contact sheets and threw them out of the window – they were bad, and probably deserved it. But it really was nothing personal – he bought me a pint in the Coach & Horses the next day, as if nothing had happened.

Benton-Harris never retired, living in Croydon, south London, and continuing to shoot pictures and work on book projects until shortly before his death.

He is survived by Jane and their three children, Emma, Mark and Jessica, and five grandchildren, and by seven of his siblings.