I have always subscribed to the Cartier-Bresson philosophy that you should be able to blend in on the high street of Shanghai with a couple of Leicas, stark naked."The result of this enduring personal project is Living Apart: South Africa Under Apartheid, a disturbingly beautiful retrospective of Berry's work spanning 35 years, from 1960 to 1995, published next week.If it feels as if we have seen Berry's images (or images like them) before, it is because we have. The South Africa they portray is familiar to us precisely because photojournalists such as Berry have shaped our preconceptions. In the foreword to the book, Archbishop Tutu describes Berry's images as "a searing indictment of our inhumanity to one another, and an important record to counteract amnesia". But Berry's gaze goes beyond historical reportage, evincing the archetypes of Afrikaner, English and African consciousness and the subtle shifts they have made over three decades.What essentially is it about South Africa that these images portray? And how relevant are they to the new democratic era of today?The most obvious point about Berry's apartheid-era images is that we rarely see black and white together in the same frame. Berry wanted to show the racial groups reacting to one another, but physical constraints rendered this difficult to accomplish. Indeed, the only time we observe them together is in the master-servant relationship. Such images - such as the one of a black flower-seller humbly holding out a bunch of flowers to a stiff white couple doing their best to ignore her, or the backs of a white couple strolling hand in hand, cut off from two lithe black men frolicking on the whites-only beach behind them - are telling for two reasons.

They show how blacks were rendered invisible by their white masters - place your hand over the black person in the image to airbrush him out, and you will see what most white South Africans saw: nothing - and, secondly, they show that the interaction between the races was always on the white man's terrain. (The beach image, incidentally, had an unexpected fan - it was Francois Mitterrand's favourite photograph, and hung on the wall of his presidential office, as well as being on the front of a book about his life.)The black people in these images are in perpetual motion - smiling, jiving, gesturing, demonstrating - usually in groups, with indomitable, raw passion and energy. White people, in contrast, appear static, isolated and pensive, their jaws set like granite against the world They may have the power, but they rarely look happy. It was this over-simplification of the Afrikaner as an immovable object that led Berry and other foreign journalists to believe, mistakenly, that the final transition to democracy would be a bloody one.