Ian Berry

Ian Berry was born in Lancashire, England, in 1934. 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 Berry to join Magnum Photos in 1962, when he was based in Paris. He became a full member of the agency five years later. In 1964, he moved to London to become the first contract photographer for The Observer Magazine. While there, he completed a project in the Whitechapel area, with the first grant for a photographer from the Arts Council, photographing the changing community and his country of origin with fresh eyes after many years abroad. This work became a book titled The English (1978).

Since then, assignments have taken him around the world. He was the first photographer to get into Prague on the day the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, and he has covered conflicts in Israel, Vietnam, and Congo, as well as the Troubles in Ireland, have been his subjects. Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; conflicts in Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and Congo; famine in Ethiopia; and apartheid in South Africa. The major body of work produced in South Africa is represented in two of his books — Black and Whites: L’Afrique du Sud (1988) with a foreword by the then French president François Mitterrand, and Living Apart (1996) with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Editorial assignments have included work for National Geographic, Fortune, Stern, Geo, national Sunday magazines, Esquire, Paris-Match, and Life. Berry has also reported on the political and social transformations in China and the former USSR. Recent projects have involved tracing the route of the Silk Road through Turkey, Iran, and southern Central Asia to northern China for Condé Nast Traveler, photographing Berlin for a Stern supplement, capturing South Africa for a whole issue of Merian magazine, the Three Gorges Dam project in China for the Telegraph Magazine, and Greenland for a book on climate control. Along with two books for the Spanish fishing industry, he completed one on child slavery in Ghana, a problem still prevalent in many parts of the world. Other books include Women in Wine, The Sporting Horse, and Famous Piazzas. For the last six years, he has photographed in China, recently holding a large exhibition in Shanghai.

For many years, Berry has worked on a long-term project, Water, which documents the disaster humanity is making of the planet. It was published by GOST in late 2023. He hopes that these images will jolt people into stopping the wanton destruction that is taking place throughout the land. Now that the book is available, he is concentrating on the projects that he has been working on alongside Water.