An exhibition in Paris is showcasing original photos from the conscientious, perspicacious South African photographer Ernest Cole, whose revelatory work has resurfaced in recent years. Some viewers will be familiar with Cole thanks to Raoul Peck, who made the emotionally charged film Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which premiered at the 77th annual Cannes Film Festival and was awarded best documentary. (Peck’s previous filmography includes 2016’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.) “House of Bondage: Vintage Prints from the Ernest Cole Family Trust – Part II” at Magnum Gallery is the second installment of a three-part exhibition, each featuring different works. The first installment has already been shown at Goodman Gallery in London; the third, in Cape Town, is coming down the pipeline later this month.
Cole, born in South Africa in 1940, chronicled the quotidian barbarity of apartheid as one of the first Black freelance photographers in his native country. There was no othering in his gaze: he was subjected to the same crushing, brutish framework he was documenting.
Cole began as a contributor to DRUM Magazine, a South African publication aimed at a Black readership. Under the Population Registration Act, South African citizens were designated racially: Black, white, colored or Indian. For Cole to gain access to the stories he wanted to report, he registered himself as “colored” to approach areas Black people were prohibited from. The risks inherent in his métier were acute: he could easily have been jailed for his stark photos. (Three photos in the show capture policemen scrutinizing the “passes” of Black men.) His images of miners—who were exclusively Black laborers—are seen in the show undergoing a sadistic medical examination: In one chilling image, about a dozen naked male bodies in a row are seen from behind, their arms held up above their heads as though in surrender. In this dangerous line of work, miners “either got unlucky, injured, killed or died of illness,” South African photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa noted in the nearby wall text. Sobekwa laments that things “haven’t changed enough in democratic South Africa.”
Nearby, Cole’s series shadowing Black domestics—adjusting a fruit bowl, changing linens—showcases another form of oppression. Clad in white aprons, Black women are seen affectionately caring for children still too young to denigrate the help their parents already have. Through these images, Cole depicted what critic/artist Vusumzi Nkomo described as “fundamental racial Slave-Master antagonisms… the violence and terror that secures and sustains the white social life and its parasitic dependency on and constitutive relation to the production of the absolute and extreme racial other.”
A different kind of degradation is exemplified by Blacks who were banished—a cruelty implemented by Dutch and English colonial administrations, perpetuated thereafter—into no man’s land territory. Cole photographed those punished as dissidents, ripped from their homes without notice, disenfranchised and isolated.
Less agonizingly, he also depicted African spiritual rituals, typified by festive garments, gamboling instruments and water rites. Although they appear to be unfettered practices here, these animistic beliefs were of course vilified by the white population. Critic Nkgopoleng Moloi noted of this scornfulness that: “by denying this connection to divinity, not only could the oppressor dehumanize the other but also validate his violent imposition of so-called civilization upon them.”
In 1966, Cole fled South Africa for the United States (he lied upon exiting the country and claimed he was going on a Catholic mission to Lourdes). Across the Atlantic, he concentrated on street photography. The presence of interracial or queer couples he encountered in public space in New York City would have been unthinkable anywhere else, but despite this sliver of exceptional progressiveness, Cole’s experiences in America confirmed the ubiquity of racism. It was especially flagrant in the segregated South, where the structural inequality behind Jim Crow laws reflected an evident similitude to apartheid.
Cole’s first and only book spotlighting the indignities of apartheid, “House of Bondage,” was published in New York in 1967 and in London in 1968. As Hamish Crooks, Magnum’s former global licensing director, wrote: “Every image in the book is an accusation.” It was banned in South Africa, though knowledge of his work there was minimal; he was stripped of his South African passport in 1968 and lived in exile for the rest of his life. After the publication of the book, the Ford Foundation asked Cole to apply his apartheid-trained eye on the southern United States. Cole, however, never felt implicated in the same way as he did in his homeland; the American racial struggle was not his heritage.
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The latter part of Cole’s life is murky. Between 1969 and 1971, he visited Sweden, where he became involved in a photo collective and exhibited. But he abruptly stopped working as a photographer thereafter—and the details of his life between that point and his death of pancreatic cancer in 1990, before he reached 50, are unknown.
His work was mostly forgotten until 2017 when more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives materialized from a Stockholm bank vault. How this body of work landed there and who paid to store it for four decades remains unknown. Cole’s nephew brought the work to Magnum in 2018 and also contacted Raoul Peck, which instigated the aforementioned documentary project. Cole’s story felt resonant with Peck’s own—he himself having fled the dictatorship in Haiti.
Museums have shown interest in collecting Cole’s work—including the Centre Pompidou (10 works), the Tate (12 works) and MoMA (41 works). It is meaningful to have a record for such a harrowing part of global history, still ongoing in its effect on society today. Posthumously, House of Bondage was re-released by Aperture in 2022. Cole’s photographs spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s, taken in the United States, were published in The True America, also by Aperture, in 2024.
Cole’s photos are discomfiting, but his images aren’t miserabilist—they aptly reflect the injustice of a racist system. As art critic Moloi points out in the exhibition, visibility such as the kind Cole provided is a way to acknowledge and attempt to repair “the process through which Black bones, blood, sweat and tears are churned into output from which economic value is derived.”
“House of Bondage: Vintage Prints from the Ernest Cole Family Trust – Part II” is on view at Magnum Gallery through March 29, 2025.
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