Ian Berry has spent his career capturing the faces of people living in a changing South Africa. Laura Davis reports

THE first time Ian Berry visited South Africa, the country was so segregated that he remained almost unaware of how extreme the separation was.

He was 17-years-old, looking for adventure and apprenticed to a photographer and family friend.

“At that time you really didn’t come across any Africans except in a servant-employer capacity, so I arrived and mixed in with the white community and it was only later when I went to work for an African magazine that I started to recognise what was going on,” says Preston-born Berry.

“I’m pretty apolitical but it was a whole awakening.”

That first visit was one of many he would make, later as a photographer for national newspapers and international publications, recording South African people during and post-Apartheid.

More than 100 of his photographs taken over four decades feature in the exhibition, Living Apart, opening at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum on Friday.

When the National Party came to power in 1948, it built on previous governments’ policies to create a regimented system of segregation.

Different racial groups were forced to live separately and unequally under a regime of political, legal and economic discrimination.

What is striking about Berry’s work is that it captures the emotions of the people experiencing this difficult world.

In one image, taken in 1969, a young black nanny, barely out of childhood herself, is looking after a baby girl for a white family. She leans languidly out of a car window. A smile lights up the face of a man in another photograph, taken in Johannesburg in 1995. One hand on his hip, the other arm flung to one side in an extravagant gesture, his posture greatly contrasts with that of the young nanny.

“I attempted to show the feelings between different races – the relationships not just between black and white but between English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking, mixed race people and Africans and also the African-Indian relationship,” he says.

“It’s very easy to go to some rich white house and photograph African servants serving the white mistress tea but that’s a bit obvious.”

He has always felt more threatened by Afrikaners (descendants of 17th-century European settlers), especially police, than by Africans, he said, but his latest trip to the north of the country showed him another side.

“I wanted to show how the white farmers in the North are also having a bad time,” he explains. “Quite a number are being killed and others are having their farms taken away from them by the government.”

One owner was an 83-year-old woman whose great-grandfather was buried on the farm and was about to be evicted by an African man who claimed a right to the property.

“So you have to have some sympathy for these people,” says Berry.

“It’s interesting politically, because although a French and a German magazine used the pictures the Brits wouldn’t look at them because it was non-PC to show South Africa in a slightly unfavourable light.”