Ian Berry, the photographer who shot Sharpeville, dies at 92

Ian Berry, the British photojournalist whose photographs of the shooting at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 became the images through which the world came to see apartheid, has died aged 92. As The Guardian reported on 11 October, Berry was one of only two journalists inside the police station grounds when the shooting began, and his pictures carried the killing of dozens of demonstrators to an international audience.

Berry had been in South Africa since 1952, when he arrived at 17 under a postwar assisted emigration scheme. He worked first in Johannesburg for Roger Madden, a family acquaintance who had recently returned from assisting the American photographer Ansel Adams, and who taught him large-format work and darkroom printing. Berry chose the smaller Leica instead. He went on to studio work and small-town editorial assignments, then joined the Rand Daily Mail, where he covered the opening of the 1956 treason trial, with Nelson Mandela among the defendants.

He moved to Drum, the South African weekly aimed at a black readership, after learning that Tom Hopkinson, formerly the editor of Picture Post in London, was coming to edit it. Hopkinson persuaded him to take the job, and a few months later sent him to Sharpeville.

On that day, a crowd gathered outside a police station in the Transvaal township as part of a nationwide protest against the pass laws that controlled where black South Africans could live, work and travel. Police stood on top of their armoured personnel carriers behind a fence. Berry took a few frames, saw nothing much developing, and turned back towards his car. Then the gunfire started.

He and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and were the only journalists there when the shooting began. Berry photographed the aftermath. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. The event became known around the world as the Sharpeville massacre and is widely regarded as a turning point in the country’s history.

For South Africans, the photographs did a specific kind of work. In a country where the state controlled much of what was printed and broadcast, images taken inside the police station grounds were hard to dispute. Berry was later called to give evidence at the trial of the wounded, who had been charged with obstruction.

It was the first time Berry had been shot at, or had seen people killed. It was not the last. His career took him to the Congo crisis after independence in 1960 to 1965, the Vietnam war, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 in which coal waste engulfed a Glamorgan village, and the six-day war between Israel and its neighbours in June 1967.

In 1968, when Magnum’s Paris bureau asked him to go to Prague as Soviet tanks moved in, he flew to Munich, rented a car and drove to the Czech border, where journalists were being turned away. He talked his way past a Russian officer by saying he was on his way to an architects’ conference he had read about on the flight. He photographed the first days of the invasion and smuggled the film out in the hubcaps and door panels of his rented Volkswagen Beetle for publication in Paris Match.

Berry moved to Paris in 1962, met the Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, and became a full member of the agency five years later. He remained with Magnum until his death. He had left Paris for London by then to become a contract photographer for the Observer, shooting the British arts scene for the paper’s weekend magazine alongside his reporting trips abroad. He photographed John Gielgud, Dusty Springfield, Lindsay Anderson and Henry Moore, and built a reputation for observational portrait work.

His engagement with South Africa did not end with Sharpeville. He returned to the subject in two books, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. Other long projects looked at daily life in China and the former Soviet Union. In later years a commission to photograph Greenland’s retreating glaciers grew into Water, a study of how water sustains life and how scarcity, pollution and destructive force expose humanity’s impact on the planet. Drawing on 15 years of work, it was published in 2023 with an essay by his second wife, Kathie Webber, whom he married in 1973.

Berry was born in Preston, Lancashire, the son of Walter, who owned garages, and Ethel, born McKimmings, a housewife. He was a boarder at Rossall school on the coast at Fleetwood. His first wife was Shirley, a South African, with whom he had a daughter. He also had a son from another relationship. Both children predeceased him. He is survived by Kathie.

For readers in this country, the obituary record matters because the Sharpeville photographs are part of how the events of 21 March 1960 are still taught, commemorated and argued over. Human Rights Day is observed in South Africa on that date each year. The images Berry made that afternoon, from behind the fence and then in the chaos that followed, remain among the most reproduced photographs in the country’s history.