Ian Berry, the photographer who showed the world Sharpeville, dies at 92
The British photojournalist was the only photographer at the police station on 21 March 1960, and his pictures of the shooting carried the township's dead and wounded around the world.
Ian Berry, the photojournalist whose photographs of the shooting at Sharpeville became the images through which much of the world learned what had happened there, has died aged 92.
As The Guardian reported in its obituary on 11 October, Berry was at the police station in the Transvaal township on 21 March 1960 when police opened fire on a crowd gathered as part of a nationwide protest against the pass laws.
Berry was 29 and working for Drum, the South African weekly edited by Tom Hopkinson, who had sent him to Sharpeville a few months after hiring him. He and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and were the only journalists at the station when the shooting started.
Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. Berry, who had been photographing police standing on their armoured personnel carriers across the fence, turned back towards his car when the gunfire began.
The photographs he took of what followed travelled far beyond South Africa. They were among the first images of the apartheid state’s violence to reach an international audience at scale, and 21 March is now marked in South Africa as Human Rights Day.
Berry was later called to give evidence at the trial of the wounded, who had been charged with obstruction.
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 learned large-format photography and darkroom printing from Roger Madden, before settling on the Leica.
He worked for the Rand Daily Mail, covering the opening of the treason trial in 1956, in which Nelson Mandela was one of the defendants, before joining Drum. Sharpeville was the first time he had been shot at or seen people killed. It was not the last.
His career took him to the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1965, the Vietnam war, the Aberfan disaster of 1966 in Wales, 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 travelling to an architects’ conference, photographed the early days of the resistance to 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.
Berry joined Magnum Photos in 1962 and became a full member five years later, remaining with the agency until his death. He moved to London to work as a contract photographer for the Observer, shooting the British arts scene for its weekend magazine alongside reporting assignments abroad.
His long engagement with South Africa produced two books, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. He also photographed the East End of London on a Whitechapel Gallery commission in 1972, published The English in 1978 on an Arts Council bursary, and spent 15 years on Water, an examination of how water sustains life and how its scarcity and pollution expose humanity’s impact on the planet, published in 2023 with an essay by his second wife, Kathie Webber.
Berry married Webber in 1973. His first wife was Shirley, a South African, with whom he had a daughter, and he had a son from another relationship. Both children predeceased him. He is survived by Kathie.
