Ian Berry, the photographer who shot Sharpeville, dies at 92
The British photojournalist was one of only two journalists inside the fence when police opened fire on pass-law protesters on 21 March 1960.
Ian Berry, the photojournalist who took the pictures at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960 and carried them to the world, has died aged 92. As The Guardian reported on 11 October, his death closes a career that began in Johannesburg in the 1950s and ran through the Congo crisis, Vietnam, Aberfan and the Six-Day War.
For South Africans the Sharpeville photographs are not a foreign portfolio. They are the record of a Tuesday afternoon in a Transvaal township, when a crowd gathered outside a police station as part of a nationwide protest against the pass laws that controlled where black South Africans could live, work and travel. Berry and Humphrey Tyler, a reporter for the Drum weekly, had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested. They were the only journalists there when the shooting started.
Berry had pushed to the front and photographed police standing on their armoured personnel carriers behind the fence. With little happening, he turned back towards his car. Then the gunfire began without warning. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. The photographs he took in the next minutes became the images the world would know as the Sharpeville massacre.
That day is a fixed point in this country’s history. Sharpeville is where the state’s answer to a peaceful pass-law protest was written in bodies, and it is the reason 21 March is now Human Rights Day on the South African calendar. The photographs did not create that meaning. They made it impossible to deny.
Berry’s pictures also entered the legal record. He was called to give evidence at the trial of the wounded, who had been charged with obstruction. His presence inside the fence, and Tyler’s, is the reason the country has a first-hand visual account of what the police did that afternoon rather than only the version produced afterwards.
He was born in Preston, Lancashire, the son of Walter, who owned garages, and Ethel, and came to South Africa in 1952 at 17 under a postwar assisted emigration scheme. In Johannesburg he worked for Roger Madden, who taught him the large-format camera and the darkroom before Berry found his own path with a Leica. He worked for the Rand Daily Mail, covering the opening of the 1956 treason trial, in which Nelson Mandela was a defendant.
It was Tom Hopkinson, the former editor of Picture Post, who brought him to Drum, the weekly aimed at a black readership, and who sent him to Sharpeville a few months later. The pictures brought him wider international attention and, through Hopkinson, an introduction to Magnum Photos, the agency he stayed with until his death. He became a full member in 1967.
South Africa stayed with him. His continuing engagement with apartheid produced two books, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. He died survived by his second wife, Kathie Webber, whom he married in 1973. 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.
