Ian Berry’s Living Apart is a photographic account of South Africa under apartheid and of the social order that institutionalized racial separation. Published by Phaidon Press in 1996, the 256-page book considers apartheid not simply as political doctrine, but as a system governing everyday proximity and division. Its title identifies the regime’s defining contradiction: people occupying the same national space were compelled by law and custom to live separately.

Berry’s engagement with South Africa began when he travelled there at seventeen. He was present at Sharpeville in 1960 and returned repeatedly over the following decades, photographing both ordinary lives and moments of major political change. The book’s historical span extends to Nelson Mandela’s election and its aftermath. Rather than confining apartheid to one crisis or period, Living Apart brings together work made across a prolonged transformation.

That duration gives the book its documentary importance. Politics, race relations and social conditions appear as interdependent subjects, placing public events within the society that experienced them. A foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu adds a significant contemporary voice to Berry’s photographic record, connecting the volume to South Africa’s moral and political reckoning with apartheid.

For collectors concerned with documentary photography, Living Apart merits attention as a substantial monograph joining a consequential historical subject to a photographer’s sustained, firsthand engagement. Its scope encompasses the consolidation of apartheid, decades of enforced separation and the democratic turning point represented by Mandela’s election. The result is not an isolated portfolio of emblematic incidents, but a book-length record in which political history and lived experience remain inseparable.