Magnum Photos
Pro LicensingPhotographersEventsIn MotionStore
share on Twitter  Like Featured Photographer: Ian Berry on Facebook

"The great single picture is emotionally satisfying, whereas getting a good journalistic story is more about being a professional."

Ian Berry was born in Lancashire, England. He made his reputation in South Africa, where he worked for the Daily Mail and later for Drum magazine. He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville in 1960, and his photographs were used in the trial to prove the victims' innocence.

Henri Cartier-Bresson invited Ian Berry to join Magnum in 1962, when he was based in Paris. He moved to London in 1964 to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. Since then assignments have taken him around the world.

» Read more

South Africa. Northern Transvaal. Nr Pietersburg. Annual meeting of members of the Zion Christian Church. Just prior to the elections leaders of the main parties including whites attended, attempting to influence the outcome. 1994 © Ian Berry/Magnum Photos

In the post-war period the South African government gradually developed a policy that was meant to retain forever the rights and privileges of a white minority: apartheid. Racial prejudices and tensions create difficulties in many societies, but only in South Africa was segregation institutionalized and regulated. The results were tragic and disturbing. The camera of Ian Berry has uniquely recorded this aspect of the South African experience: the duty to 'live apart' while occupying the same space. He first set out for South Africa as a boy of seventeen and thus began a career of recording ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. Present at the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, Berry has returned to South Africa many times in the course of the succeeding decades and captured many of its most significant moments, including the 1994 election and its remarkable aftermath. As his photographs show, the wounds of over forty years of apartheid cannot be quickly or easily forgotten.

Like http://www.facebook.com/MagnumPhotos on Facebook