Ian Berry, the photographer who shot Sharpeville and refused to look away, dies at 92

Ian Berry, the British photojournalist whose photographs from outside the Sharpeville police station on 21 March 1960 became one of the defining visual records of the apartheid era, has died aged 92. As The Guardian reported on 11 October, Berry was the only stills photographer at the scene when police opened fire on a crowd protesting against the pass laws, and his images of the dead and the fleeing carried the name Sharpeville around the world.

Berry had arrived in South Africa in 1952 at 17 under a postwar assisted emigration scheme, and by 1960 was working for Drum, the weekly aimed at a black readership, under the editorship of Tom Hopkinson. Hopkinson sent him to Sharpeville. Berry and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and were the only journalists present when the shooting started. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. Berry had been taking a few frames of police standing on their armoured vehicles across the fence and had turned back towards his car when the gunfire began.

The pictures were not a foreign correspondent’s souvenir. They were evidence, and the South African state treated them as such. Berry was called to give evidence at the trial of the wounded, who had been charged with obstruction, and his photographs were reproduced in newspapers and magazines abroad at a time when the events at Sharpeville were being reported to the world largely through the accounts of those who had been there. That the massacre became a turning point in the country’s history is now a settled part of the record. Berry’s frames are part of how it was seen.

South African readers will recognise the wider arc of the career that followed. Berry stayed with the story of this country long after he left it, returning to it in two book projects, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. His first wife, Shirley, was South African. Long before those books, he had worked for the Rand Daily Mail, covering the opening of the 1956 treason trial in which Nelson Mandela was a defendant, and it was through Drum and Hopkinson that he first came to the attention of Magnum Photos, the agency with which he remained associated for the rest of his life.

His career took him from the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1965 to the Vietnam war, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 and the six-day war of June 1967. In 1968 he talked his way past a Russian officer at the Czech border by claiming to be on his way to an architects’ conference, photographed the first days of the Soviet invasion of Prague, and smuggled the film out in the hubcaps and door panels of a rented Volkswagen Beetle for publication in Paris Match. He became a full member of Magnum in 1967, a contract photographer for the Observer, and later published The English in 1978 and Water in 2023, the latter drawing on 15 years of work on how water sustains life and how its scarcity and pollution expose humanity’s impact on the planet.

For a South African reader, the Sharpeville photographs are not an entry in a foreign career. They are part of the country’s own archive, made by a 27-year-old who had been here eight years, who had learned the trade in Johannesburg and who chose, when the warning came, to stay. Berry is survived by his second wife, Kathie Webber, whom he married in 1973. Both of his children predeceased him.