Ian Berry (1934-2026)

Rabbi Dr Frank Dabba Smith shares with us his eulogy from the memorial for Ian Berry in Salisbury on the 2nd October.

I was a newcomer to Ian’s world as Ian and I met only about two and one-half years ago. It was at the AGM of the Leica Society (known to some of us as the ‘Leica Hysterical Society’). Here, Ian presented his photographs in a delightful way  –with the help of Kathie–  and I shared the documentary film about my research into the wartime history of the company producing Leicas.

Ian and I met up fairly often in central London –usually joined by fellow photographer Adrian Bradshaw and once with photographer-academic Michael Bradley and UCL Professor Michael Berkowitz— for lunch and discussion, sometimes after viewing an exhibition of photographs or drooling over the Leica gear at Red Dot Cameras. We also did a bit of street-shooting in the East End plus Adrian and I enjoyed Ian and Kathie’s warm hospitality at lunch in their lovely home.

I shall never forget Ian’s unaffected modesty and self-deprecating humour. In emails, he referred to himself as the ‘old git’. The Cartier-Bresson prints hanging on the walls of his home were rescues from a bin at the Magnum office in Paris.  He admired the results of my super-duper 35mm APO-Summicron lens but said that, for his simple purposes, Voightländers were plenty good enough. Still, a few months ago, he did agonise over the latest version of the 35mm Summilux but thriftiness denied him any such impulse and, more important, his ‘ordinary Summicron’ was more compact.

Ian occasionally dispensed advice. When I was travelling in Vietnam last year, he emailed sagely: ‘Steer clear of Pepsi or Coke boats on the river, the competition is such that they tend to shoot at each other, or was that Thailand?’.

Ian was coming from a place, as Adrian Bradshaw summarised so succinctly, where the photograph mattered much more than the photographer.  Furthermore, as Ian wrote in the foreword to his book The English, he recognised that his photographs ‘…only offer a personal and partial view of what one has seen’.  It is up to the viewer to ‘…draw their own conclusions about the photographs and what they add up to’.  Ian was under no illusions that photographs and their possible meanings are anything but hopelessly contingent.

Ian was a photojournalist but, most of all, was responding to what he called ‘visual situations’.  Having a ‘good eye’ was paramount and he held firm opinions about who had such a vision and who did not.  His eye was motivated by humanitarianism and a strong sense of justice combined with a healthy suspicion of power, money, celebrity, fame, institutionalised religion, and, in fact, any sizable organisation.

I wish to suggest two photographs as embodying what I have described. The first is on page 69 of Ian’s landmark book, The English, and was made in Ashington, Northumberland. The silhouetted tiny figure of a woman is placed along a walkway that emerges from a vast foreground darkness and vanishes into mist.  The woman is framed by two diagonal rows of chimneyed houses, vertical poles, and the horizontal wire at top. She is up and out of the house very early. To her right, the washing has been hung out; a line of white sheets.

Echoing Ian’s words in the foreword, so many questions arise in this viewer’s mind.

Another photograph by Ian that I love was made in Oman in 2004 and, this time, in colour.  Ian wrote, ‘I spotted these children playing with kites fashioned from plastic bags. As happens, maybe once a year all the elements —kids, kites, bike, goats, even the telegraph wires— slotted together to make the shape and capture a joyous moment’. The horizontal wires, a vertical pole, and the ominous fortress in the background remind me of elements of the photograph made decades earlier in Ashington. This time, however, the composition delivers unmitigated joy on the faces of two children and a woman, presumably, their mother. In both photographs, Ian used a somewhat similar compositional structure albeit with utterly different lighting and tones, to render everyday occurrences in the lives of ordinary human beings into images that speak to us of human dignity despite meagre circumstances. 

Ian, thank you for sharing your eye with us so graciously. We shall greatly miss you but your gifts shall sustain us always.

Ian, may you rest in peace but, go on, get the latest 35mm Summilux and stay clear of irksome boats on the world’s rivers.

Rabbi Dr Frank Dabba Smith

Salisbury, 2 October 2026