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Ernest Cole

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Cole’s approach was not simply to show the ‘horrors’ but also how people survived and expressed their humanity. ‘The Mines’ essay revealed a 360-degree photographic endeavour that became his aesthetic trademark. He shows the arrival and departure of workers from trains, the medicals, how they eat, sleep, AND drink.

The other essays in House of Bondage, include amongst others – the pass laws, education, domestic work, and healthcare. The book ends with banishment where ‘trouble makers’ and opponents of apartheid were removed to desolated areas. MoMA curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, summarises Cole’s contribution to South African photography as well as to the larger history of photography in her essay in the new edition, and aptly observes: ‘Deftly harnessing image and text, Cole mines the grounds upon which Black life in South Africa during the twentieth century was surveilled, regulated, and subjected to forms of punitive existence. His lucid analysis and sophisticated visual grammar produces a blistering critique that reverberates not through the register of the spectacular, but rather through the relentless documentation of so-called unremarkable scenes’.

Ernest Cole was born in Eesterust in 1940, near Pretoria and died in New York a week after Mandela and others were released from jail in 1990. Cole who worked for Drum, Bantu World, Sunday Times and other publications learnt photography through a correspondence course as well as through those he worked with. He documented courageously and thoroughly life under apartheid from the perspective of a black person. House of Bondage was first published in 1967. As he wrote in the book, “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.” He paid a price for his commitment and documentation. The book was immediately banned and so was he. He lived in exile until his death in New York.

There has been much speculation about what happened to his negatives and prints. Until relatively recently it was thought all his negatives and many prints were lost. However in 2017, 60 000 negatives were handed to the Ernest Cole Family Trust by the Hasselblad Foundation. These include not seen South African work as well as his documentation on the American South and black life in the USA. The PLP is working with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, Magnum Photos and Wits Historical Papers to digitse and make this hidden work accessible. This is an ongoing project.

The Ernest Cole Photography Award has been established in his honour (see https://www.ernestcoleaward.co.za/)