Ian Berry, the photographer who stood inside Sharpeville, dies at 92

Ian Berry, the British photojournalist who was one of only two journalists inside Sharpeville when police opened fire on pass-law protesters on 21 March 1960, has died aged 92. As The Guardian reported on 11 October, Berry was working for Drum, the South African weekly aimed at a black readership, when he was sent to the Transvaal township.

A crowd had 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 photographed police standing on their armoured personnel carriers behind a fence. He had turned back towards his car when the shooting started. He and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and they were the only journalists there when the firing began.

Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. The images Berry took that day became known around the world as the Sharpeville massacre, and the date is now marked in South Africa as Human Rights Day.

Sharpeville was a turning point. Within weeks the apartheid state had banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and the country’s politics moved into three decades of exile, underground organisation and armed struggle. The photographs did international work that no press statement could do, and they did it at a moment when the state was still presenting its account of the day as a matter of crowd control.

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 a garage owner and a housewife, and arrived in South Africa in 1952 at the age of 17 under a postwar assisted emigration scheme. In Johannesburg he learned large-format photography and darkroom printing from Roger Madden, who had recently returned from assisting Ansel Adams in the United States, before striking out on his own with a Leica.

He worked for the Rand Daily Mail and covered the opening of the 1956 treason trial, at which Nelson Mandela was one of the defendants. He joined Drum after persuading its incoming editor, Tom Hopkinson, the former editor of Picture Post in London, to give him a job. It was Hopkinson who sent him to Sharpeville a few months later.

Berry moved to Paris in 1962 and became a full member of Magnum Photos five years later, remaining with the agency until his death. He covered the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1965, 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 invasion of Prague, and smuggled the film out of the country in the hubcaps and door panels of a rented Volkswagen Beetle for publication in Paris Match.

South Africa never left his work. His continuing engagement with apartheid produced two books, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. The first appeared while the state of emergency and the pass laws were still in force. The second appeared two years after the first democratic election.

For South African readers, the Sharpeville photographs are not archive material. They are the visual record of a day that shaped the country’s constitutional settlement, and they are taught in schools and reproduced in the exhibits of the museums and memorial sites that carry the history. Berry’s death closes the last direct journalistic link to the inside of that police station yard.

He is 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.