He suffered a stroke on 19 September 2009 the opening day of his exhibition to launch Fashion Etcetera at Milk Gallery in New York, and died at home in Bowral, Australia, nine weeks later.

Haskins' formal higher education was at the Johannesburg Technical College 1945–1948, where he did a general arts course followed by a part-time photographic module.

This featured black-and-white photography of models in the studio and included some photographs of dolls made by the young Elisabeth Langsch, who went on to become Switzerland's leading ceramist.

The images represent a lifelong interest in photographing graphically stimulating environments and formally document his passion for indigenous craft.

He broke bones on river rapids and wrote off two Volvo saloon cars on African dirt roads while shooting the book.

Despite its international award, this meticulously constructed book, celebrating a love for sub-Saharan Africa, is probably the least known of his major creative projects, but it is coveted by serious collectors of African art and photography.

He worked as an advertising photographer for international consumer brands Asahi Pentax, Bacardi, Cutty Sark whisky, Honda, BMW, Haig whisky, DeBeers, British Airways, Unilever and Zanders, and specialised in the art direction and shooting of calendars, especially for Asahi Pentax in Japan.

At the time the best-known image from Haskins Posters, a girl's face superimposed on an apple with a bee near the stem, appeared on the cover or in editorials of almost every major photographic magazine around the world.

Haskins had a recurring theme (rooted in his training as a painter) of creating tension in the surface of his photographs between flat graphic elements and 3D chiaroscuro.

A highly creative and design driven approach to lighting almost always played a key role in Haskins' work, both in the studio and on location.

A shortage of copies of the original edition of Cowboy Kate & Other Stories (1964), which was selling to collectors for up to US$3,000, led Haskins to bring out a digitally remastered 'director's cut' version in October 2006, published by Rizzoli in New York.

In December 2006, a month after his 80th birthday, the first retrospective exhibition of his work (with a portraiture bias) opened at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra (Australia).

Although one or two of the images from that personal portrait project had previously been published, the majority remained part of a quiet collection built up over decades of meeting and befriending other artists.

In 2009, the last year of Haskins' life, his "Fashion Etcetera" book and exhibition received widespread global publicity, and in the process, turned images of Gill from 'Five Girls' (1962) into one of the new-found icons of the 1960s.

Haskins developed a medium format slide show comprising up to 500 images, each displayed for seven seconds, synchronised to music.

Between 1980 and 1985, he ran one-week workshops for writers, cinematographers, directors and set designers at Norwegian Television's training school in Oslo.

Haskins maintained close links with Syracuse University in the US, hosting groups of visiting students at his studio in London every summer from 1975 to 1988.