Ian Berry
KEY IMAGES FROM INTERNATIONAL PHOTO-JOURNALIST
Ian Berry: The Water Project
31 Mar 24 Jun
Ian Berry: In the North
31 Mar 10 Jun
Curated by Val Williams
"The great single picture is emotionally satisfying, whereas getting a good journalistic story is more about being a professional." Ian Berry
Organised in collaboration with Magnum in its 60th anniversary year, these two new exhibitions are selected exclusively for The Lowry on Salford Quays. The Water Project provides the first opportunity to see some key images from international photo-journalist Ian Berry.
The Water Project is the culmination of Berrys ten year project focusing on the global issues surrounding the most precious of natural resources. Berry has used his camera to express his continuing concern about water, especially in the developing world ranging from falling water tables to melting ice fields.
He captures a diverse range of subjects from all over the world from fishermen in Tokyo, an African Christian Baptism ceremony, monsoons and malaria sufferers to a town in China destroyed by rising water levels. He shows children hunting for small shellfish in the mud at the edge of the Yangtze river at a bulldozed town to be flooded on completion of The Three Gorges Dam. Berry shows how families moving out of their homes, soon to be flooded, can still joke about life. In Greenland, the Jakobshavn Glacier, which is receding and thinning at a dramatic pace provides new fishing grounds for the local people who have never seen open water there before.
His powerful images include a Bangladesh mother covering her eyes as she draws water for her baby from a red-painted well indicating that the water is contaminated with arsenic. She has no choice as the village has no other source of pure water.
Fittingly, The Water Project is on The Lowrys Promenade Gallery, overlooking the Manchester Ship Canal, where the water has been transformed from its heavily polluted past to a thriving aquatic ecosystem. In the North explores the work made in the north of England by Berry, who produced iconic images of post 60s England, some of which resonate with the LS Lowry Collection.
Many of the images were taken in the 70s and were included in The English a project he undertook after been awarded the first Arts Council Photography Bursary an exploration of England and English Life. Born in Preston, Ian moved out of the country at an early age. The photographs he took for The English were made on his return to the area, and capture a strangeness in the people and places, which resonates with Lowrys approach to our region.
Like LS Lowry, his work captures street scenes and life from all over the region, ranging from children playing on a rubbish tip and old men in the street to a woman sweeping a coronation street style road and a couple dancing in a pub.
In The North is curated by Val Williams, Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the London College of Communications, and Senior Research Fellow at the London College of Fashion. Williams is also co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition, How We Are: Photographing Britain, the first major exhibition of photography ever to be held at Tate Britain.
Now in his 45th year as a Magnum photographer, Berry made his reputation as a photojournalist with his reporting from South Africa. In 1960, he was the only photographer to document the massacre at Sharpeville. His photographs were subsequently used in the trial proving the victims innocence.
While based in Paris he was invited to join Magnum in 1962 by Henri Cartier-Bresson. He moved to London in 1964 to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. Assignments have taken him worldwide documenting Russias invasion of Czechoslovakia, conflicts in Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and Zaire, famine in Ethiopia and apartheid in South Africa, the latter which inspired two books, Black and Whites LAfrique du Sud and Living Apart.
Ian Berry has won numerous awards throughout his photographic career. Awards include; the first Nikon Photographer of the Year, Picture of the Year Award from the National Press Photographers of America, British Press Magazine Photographer of the Year and the first Arts Council Grant which led to his acclaimed book, The English.
Posted on Friday, 16 March 2007 under Press Galleries Press