Sharpeville photographer Ian Berry dies at 92, the only lens at the fence on 21 March 1960

Ian Berry, the British photojournalist who was the only lens behind the fence at Sharpeville on 21 March 1960, has died aged 92. As The Guardian reported on 11 October, Berry was a young man on assignment for Drum when he took the pictures that would carry the word Sharpeville around the world.

The facts of that day are not in dispute. A crowd had gathered outside a police station in the Transvaal township, part of a nationwide protest against the pass laws that controlled where black South Africans could live, work and travel. Berry pushed to the front and shot a few frames of police standing on their armoured vehicles. Nothing much was happening. He turned back towards his car. Then the gunfire started.

Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured. Berry and the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and were the only journalists present when the shooting began. South Africans know the rest of the arc: the photographs travelled, the world reacted, and the massacre became a turning point in the country’s history.

Berry was called to give evidence at the trial of the wounded, who had been charged with obstruction. His pictures brought him international attention. Through Tom Hopkinson, the former Picture Post editor who had come to edit Drum, he became acquainted with Magnum Photos, the agency he remained with until his death.

For a South African reader, what matters most is not the obituary circuit but the body of work Berry left behind about this country. He arrived in South Africa in 1952 at 17 on a postwar assisted emigration scheme, worked for the Rand Daily Mail and covered the opening of the 1956 treason trial that included Nelson Mandela as a defendant, before joining Drum. He did not pass through. He kept coming back.

Two books came out of that continuing engagement with apartheid South Africa: Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud in 1988 and Living Apart in 1996. Anyone who has taught, studied or argued about this country’s recent past has almost certainly handled a Berry frame without knowing whose eye it was.

His career took him well beyond these borders. He covered 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 he was bound for an architects’ conference he had read about on the flight, photographed the first days of the invasion of Prague, and smuggled the film out in the hubcaps and door panels of a rented Volkswagen Beetle for Paris Match.

He moved to Paris in 1962, met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and became a full member of Magnum five years later. By then he had left Paris for London as a contract photographer for the Observer. In 1972 the Whitechapel Gallery commissioned him to photograph its East End neighbourhood, and two years later an Arts Council bursary, said to be the first given to a photographer, led to The English in 1978. His later project Water, drawn from 15 years of work on glaciers, scarcity and pollution, was published in 2023 with an essay by his second wife, Kathie Webber, whom he married in 1973 and who survives him. 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.

Berry was tenacious, and his edge was his eye for the human moment. He photographed the people behind the headlines, often off-centre, and told the story better by concentrating on individuals.

That is the standard South African photojournalists still work to, and Sharpeville is the reason the standard exists here. The men and women who carry cameras into this country’s public arguments today are working in a tradition Berry helped to set, on a day when he was almost alone at the fence and the state was shooting people in the back as they ran.