Photography: Documenting What No Longer Exists
In 1974 Ian Berry won a bursary from the Arts Council to photograph ‘the English’. He’d already made his name in South Africa as the only photographer to record the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. Two years later Cartier-Bresson invited him to join Magnum. He went on to work in Vietnam, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and Ethiopia; he was in Czechoslovakia in 1968. When the BBC asked if they could accompany him to Whitby on one leg of his journey for the Arts Council project, he was uneasy. He didn’t fancy being trailed by a toff in jeans and a bunch of technicians, but quickly established a rapport with the film cameraman. In the one-eyed professions every Cyclops finds a soulmate sooner or later.
Berry’s The English is one of the most impressive full-size prints in Magnum Contact Sheets, a vast, exquisite elegy to the old way of taking photos ‘just as the shift to digital photography threatens to render the contact sheet obsolete’, as the blurb explains.[*] ‘Threatens’ is an understatement. You know it the minute you set eyes on Berry’s gelatin silver print of the men and women of Whitby relaxing on a Sunday in summer above the River Esk in 1974. It is an iconic image of the English at leisure: the two oblivious protagonists - an older man in a tweed cap, a younger reclining with a straw in his mouth - hold the foreground. To their left, a group of seven people, two of them women with floral print dresses; around and below them, the town; beneath the clutter of chimneys and dormers rising from pantiled roofs, four white sails seem to hang above the water.