Ian Berry, the photographer who was at Sharpeville when the shooting started, dies at 92

Ian Berry, the British photojournalist who was one of only two journalists inside the police station grounds at Sharpeville when police opened fire on 21 March 1960, has died aged 92.

As The Guardian reported on 11 October, Berry had gone to the Transvaal township on assignment for Drum, the South African weekly edited by Tom Hopkinson and aimed at a black readership. He and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested. They were the only journalists present when the shooting began.

Berry had taken a few frames of police standing on their armoured vehicles behind the fence, found nothing much happening, and turned back towards his car. Then the gunfire started. He photographed what followed, and those frames became the visual record of what the world came to call the Sharpeville massacre. Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured.

It is worth a South African reader being precise about what Berry’s pictures did here, because the phrase “turning point” gets used loosely. Sharpeville is where the pass laws stopped being an administrative argument and became the thing the country was arguing about. The photographs travelled. Weeks later the government banned the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. The trial of the wounded, charged with obstruction, followed, and Berry was called to give evidence at it.

That detail is the one a foreign obituary tends to leave in the middle of the page. The state charged the people who had been shot. Berry’s photographs were entered into the argument about what had actually happened at that fence.

He was 17 when a postwar assisted emigration scheme brought him to South Africa in 1952. In Johannesburg he worked for Roger Madden, who had recently returned from assisting Ansel Adams in the United States and taught him large-format work and darkroom printing. Berry chose a Leica instead, the small camera the visual journalists of the day carried.

He moved through studio work and small-town editorial assignments to the Rand Daily Mail, where he covered the opening of the 1956 treason trial. Nelson Mandela was among the defendants. When he heard Hopkinson was arriving to edit Drum, he talked his way into a job there. A few months later Hopkinson sent him to Sharpeville.

It was the first time Berry 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, to the Vietnam war, to the Aberfan disaster of 1966 in Wales, and to the six-day war 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 attending 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 Paris Match.

He moved to Paris in 1962 and met Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Magnum’s co-founders, becoming a full member five years later. He then left Paris for London to shoot for the Observer, photographing figures including John Gielgud, Dusty Springfield, Lindsay Anderson and Henry Moore.

But South Africa kept pulling him back. His two books on the country, Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996, are the long version of a body of work that most readers know only from the Sharpeville frames. The 1978 collection The English came out of an Arts Council bursary reported to be the first ever given to a photographer, after the Whitechapel Gallery commissioned him in 1972 to photograph its East End neighbourhood.

Later work examined daily life in China and the former Soviet Union. A commission on Greenland’s retreating glaciers grew into Water, published in 2023 after 15 years, with an essay 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. He is survived by Kathie.

For South Africans, the archive is the argument. Berry’s Sharpeville negatives sit alongside the testimony of the people who were there, and the trial record, and the count of the dead, as the primary evidence of a day the state spent years describing differently. He was not a South African. He was, for a few minutes on 21 March 1960, one of the very few people in a position to show the country what it had done to itself.