Berry’s image of people overlooking Whitby harbour, North Yorkshire, 1974. Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos View image in fullscreen Berry’s image of people overlooking Whitby harbour, North Yorkshire, 1974. Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos Photography Obituary Ian Berry obituary Photojournalist whose arresting images captured human disaster from Vietnam to Aberfan, and most notably in apartheid South Africa
Prefer the Guardian on Google On 21 March 1960, a crowd gathered outside a police station in a Transvaal township, part of a nationwide protest against apartheid pass laws used to control where black South Africans could live, work and travel. A young British photojournalist pushed his way to the front and took a few pictures of police across the fence who were standing atop their armoured personnel carriers. With nothing much happening, he turned back and headed for his car. Then – without warning – there was the sound of heavy gunfire.
The photographer, Ian Berry, who has died aged 92, captured images of the carnage, which soon became known around the world as the Sharpeville massacre . Dozens of demonstrators were killed, many shot in the back as they fled, and hundreds were injured in what turned out to be a turning point in the country’s history.
Berry and his colleague, the Drum reporter Humphrey Tyler, had ignored police warnings that they would be arrested, and were the only journalists there when the shooting started. It was the first time Berry had been shot at, or seen others killed, but it would not be the last in a career that took him to the Congo crisis following independence in 1960-65, the Vietnam war, the Aberfan disaster of 1966, in which coal waste engulfed a Glamorgan village, and the six-day war between Israel and its neighbours in June 1967.
He was tenacious, but his edge was his eye for human moments, capturing the people behind the headlines, often photographing scenes that were off-centre, and yet told a story better by focusing on individuals.
View image in fullscreen Protesters fleeing after police open fire on a peaceful crowd in Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, South Africa, on 21 March 1960. Photograph: Ian Berry/Magnum Photos In 1968, when Magnum’s Paris bureau asked if he would go to Prague as Soviet tanks encroached, he took a plane to Munich, rented a car and drove to the Czech border, only to find that journalists were being turned away. With typical guile, Berry talked his way through, persuading a Russian officer that he was on his way to an architects’ conference, which he had read about on the flight. He captured memorable images of peaceful resistance during the first days of the invasion, then smuggled them out in the hubcaps and door panels of his rented Volkswagen Beetle for publication in Paris Match.
Born in Preston, Lancashire, Ian was the son of Walter, who owned garages, and Ethel (nee McKimmings), a housewife. He was a boarder at Rossall school, on the coast at Fleetwood, and from an early age had wanderlust. A postwar assisted emigration scheme took him to South Africa in 1952, when he was 17.
In Johannesburg he worked for a family acquaintance, Roger Madden, who had recently returned home from assisting the photographer Ansel Adams in the US. Madden taught Berry to use a large-format camera and to print in the darkroom, but he would find his own path using a diminutive Leica, the camera favoured by prominent visual journalists of the day.
Berry moved on to studio work…