Ernest Cole

Photographing apartheid from the inside

Ernest Cole grew up in a township outside Pretoria and left school early, in 1953, when the apartheid government's Bantu Education system was imposed, completing a diploma by correspondence course instead. In 1958 he applied for a job at Drum, the magazine that gave a generation of Black South African writers and photographers their start, and its picture editor Jürgen Schadeberg took him on as an assistant. In the early 1960s he began to freelance for Drum, the Rand Daily Mail and the Sunday Express, which made him South Africa's first Black freelance photographer. One account says that at twenty he managed to be reclassified as "coloured", which gave him slightly more freedom of movement and the right to practise as a photographer. He set himself a single, enormous subject: what apartheid did to the people who lived under it.

He photographed what most of the world never saw. Miners stripped and inspected in groups. Men stopped and arrested under the pass laws. Crowded classrooms, hospital wards, segregated trains and benches, servants in white homes, families in single rooms. He worked carefully and often at risk, and many of the pictures could only have been taken by someone who belonged in the places he photographed.

House of Bondage

In 1966 Cole left South Africa with his negatives. He showed his work to Magnum Photos, which he was briefly associated with, and the project was funded in part by the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. House of Bondage, published in New York by Random House in 1967 with his photographs and text, was one of the first books to show apartheid's daily workings to an international audience. It was banned in South Africa, and in 1968 the authorities banned Cole himself and took away his passport, so he could not go home.

How to look at the book: read it as a sequence, not as single pictures. The subjects run from the pass laws to schools, mines, trains and homes, so the argument builds through repetition rather than through one famous image. Notice that many of the pictures could only have been taken from inside, at close range and often at risk. Aperture re-issued House of Bondage in 2022, which makes it easy to read again.

Exile

His later years were hard. Between 1969 and 1971 he spent long periods in Sweden, where he became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From about 1972 his life fell into disarray: he stopped working as a photographer and lost control of his archive and negatives. He died of pancreatic cancer in New York on 18 February 1990, aged 49, a week after Nelson Mandela walked out of prison.

The lost archive

For decades much of Cole's work was thought to be lost. In 2017 more than 60,000 of his negatives, missing for over forty years, turned up in a bank vault in Stockholm, and in April 2018 they were handed to his heirs, who had set up the Ernest Cole Family Trust. A further 504 prints held by the Hasselblad Foundation were long in legal dispute; a Goodman Gallery report in December 2024 says the foundation handed the trust nearly 500 vintage prints earlier that year. The Haitian director Raoul Peck built his documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found around them, and the film won the Œil d'or, the prize for best documentary, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Where to see the work

Tate Modern has shown Cole's photographs in its Artist and Society display, and Magnum Photos publishes his work and sells prints and books through its shop. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is the film to see for the story of the recovered archive.

See also

Cole's work belongs with that of Peter Magubane and David Goldblatt in the documentary photography of apartheid. Read African photography and see our list of South African photographers.