Living Apart

Key information

About this event

Living Apart
An Exhibition of Photographs of South Africa
by Ian Berry
presented by Magnum Photos in association with SOAS

13 April - 25 June 2004

"A searing indictment and an important record to counteract amnesia – for those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu on "Living Apart", 12 February 1996, Cape Town

April 2004 marks the 10th anniversary of free elections in South Africa. Ian Berry's photographs portray life in a country where until relatively recently segregation was institutionalized and regulated by the government.

First setting out to South Africa as a boy of seventeen, he was to return many times recording the ordinary lives of those living in extraordinary circumstances and capturing many of the country 's most significant moments. In the 1990s the collapse of apartheid and the rise of Mandela resulted in a remarkable form of reconciliation.Ian Berry went back to South Africa to record the election and the aftermath,adding to a documentary essay that covers the apartheid era to the present day.

Ian Berry made his reputation as a photojournalist with his reporting from South Africa where he worked for the Daily Mail and later Drum magazine.He was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville, his photographs subsequently used in the trial proving the victim's innocence.