Blessed are the dehumanized for they have nothing to lose but their patience False gods killed the poet in me. Now I dig graves
with artistic precision.

—Keorapetse Kgositsile, “Mandela’s Sermon” (2002)

The Relaunch of House of Bondage by Aperture signals the return of Ernest Cole’s Legacy and missing negatives. “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….this landmark publication is one of the most important works of twentieth-century photography, and its shadow looms large in histories of photo-book making.”

Oluremi C. Onabanjo