Ernest Levi Tsoloane Cole (21 March 1940[1] – 19 February 1990) was a South African photographer. In the early 1960s, he started to freelance for clients such as Drum magazine, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Sunday Express. This made him South Africa's first black freelance photographer.[2][3]
Early life
Cole was a black South African, born in Eersterust in Pretoria, in 1940. His original family name was Kole and he later took the name Cole.[1] He left school when the Bantu Education Act was put into place in 1953, and instead completed his diploma via a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall, Oxford.[4] He started taking photographs at a very young age, eight years old, and in the 1950s, he was given a camera by a Roman Catholic priest, with which Cole broadened his portfolio. As he himself put it: "I quit school in 1957 rather than go along with the 'bantu' education for servitude which had become more strict than before."[5]
Career
Photography of segregational signs at a South-African train station, by Ernest Cole.
While working for Drum, Cole began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans—journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement—and became radicalised in his political views. He soon decided on a project that entailed recording the evils and daily social effects of apartheid.
He then worked at the Bantu World newspaper (later renamed The World – now The Sowetan), where he continued his career as a photographer.
Seeking to leave South Africa, he became re-classified as a "Coloured," not "Black" because he was able to fool the authorities.[1] As a result, he was able to leave for New York City in 1966. He secretly took his apartheid project prints with him.[7] He showed his work to Magnum Photos and this resulted in a publishing deal with publishing rights owned by Random House. The resulting book, House of Bondage (1967),[8] was banned in South Africa.
In the book, Cole writes: "Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa have placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate."[9]
Later, Cole received a grant from the Ford Foundation for another book, A study of the Negro family in the rural South and the Negro family in the urban ghetto. Although he took a large number of photographs, this project was never completed nor were additional books published.[2] As of 2020, photographs from this series began to be scanned and published.[10]
Cole subsequently moved to Sweden, where he took up filmmaking. The apartheid photos he had taken were extensively used by the ANC in their various publications.
Death
Cole died of cancer in New York City on 18 February 1990 at the age of 49.[11]
Photographic legacy
Cole's negatives were considered lost for a long time, but a collection of 60,000 negatives was found at a bank vault in Stockholm and, in April 2018, given to his heirs, who had founded The Ernest Cole Family Trust. There are still 504 photographs held at Hasselblad Foundation, with an estimated value over one million euros, and the ownership of these is in legal dispute.[1] As of 2020, the legal dispute between Cole's estate and the Hasselblad Foundation is ongoing.[12][13]
A cache of Cole's work having resurfaced in 2017,[14] his book House of Bondage was reissued in 2022 by Aperture in New York, including a new preface by Mongane Wally Serote and "a selection of previously unseen photographs of creative expression and cultural activity in Black communities; a useful corrective to the uniform view of oppression and subjugation that had been its focus."[15]
House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today. New York: Random House, 1967. ISBN0-394-42935-4. With an introduction by Joseph Lelyveld and a text by Thomas Flaherty.
The Photographer. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2010. Edited by Gunilla Knape. ISBN978-3-86930-137-2. With essays by Struan Robertson and Ivor Powel.
Documentaries
2006: Ernest Cole – Directed by Jürgen Schadeberg, 52 minutes. "This is the story of the first black photojournalist to challenge South Africa's apartheid system. Risking imprisonment, Ernest Cole dedicated his life to showing the world the injustices and exploitation of segregation. But he paid a heavy price for his work and ended up dying in exile."[18][19]
2010 – Ernest Cole: Photographer – Although not the first, this was the largest retrospective of his work displayed in Johannesburg at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The exhibition was a homecoming of sorts for Cole's legacy, as many of his photographs previously had been banned in apartheid South Africa.[28][29]
2012 – Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s – This exhibition at The Barbican Centre, London, contained a set of original prints by Ernest Cole long thought lost, but rediscovered in Sweden. The exhibition also contained a major body of work on South Africa by David Goldblatt.[30]
2014 – Ernest Cole: Photographer – This exhibition was at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University in New York City.[31][32][33] It featured more than 100 rare black-and-white gelatin silver prints from Cole's archive. This was the first major solo museum show of Cole's images. The exhibition was organised by the Hasselblad Foundation of Gothenburg, Sweden.
2023 – House of Bondage – Exhibition at foam gallery Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with pictures of a previously unpublished archive of work by Ernest Cole.[34]
Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Darren Newbury. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2009. ISBN978-1-86888-523-7. See Chapter 4. "An 'unalterable blackness': Ernest Cole's House of Bondage".
External links
Harmsen, Monica: "Ernest Cole", a presentation on the life of Ernest Cole at YouTube.
