Ernest Cole: the South African photographer at the centre of a powerful and heartbreaking film

Daily Maverick

25-04-2025

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found by Raoul Peck is a meditative film that draws on Cole's own notebooks and letters in a bold attempt to have him tell his own story.
Ernest Cole is famous for photographing the everyday realities of South Africa's racist apartheid system. His 1967 book House of Bondage ensured his damning critique of the white minority regime was seen by the world. But its publication sent him into exile and was banned at home.
The startling discovery of a vast archive of his work in a Swedish bank vault in 2017 has returned him to public view. House of Bondage was republished in 2023 and then, in 2024, celebrated Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck made Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.
It would win the documentary prize at the Cannes Film Festival and show around the world, restoring the legacy of a photographer who died penniless in New York in 1990 at the age of 49.
As a researcher of South African photography under apartheid, I was intrigued by how the film would convey this complex life story.
It draws extensively on Cole's images, made in South Africa, Europe and the US. It's a beautiful, poetic interpretation of how his images mirrored his own experiences of oppression, displacement and the loneliness of exile.
House of Bondage
Cole was just 10 when the state introduced the Group Areas Act and entrenched racial segregation. He was 22 when his childhood neighbourhood of Eersterust was razed to the ground. His family was among the thousands forcibly removed to a new township.
In his second year of high school, he elected to drop out. The state had introduced Bantu Education, designed to ensure Black children learned only enough for a life of servitude.
Cole began to study by correspondence, taking a course with the New York Institute for Photography. By 18, he'd landed a position as a darkroom assistant at Drum magazine, working alongside German photographer Jürgen Schadeberg.
In 1959, Cole saw a copy of French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson 's The People of Moscow, and decided he would create a similar book to convey what it meant to live under apartheid.
He spent six years taking the photographs that would become House of Bondage, a book that exposed the apartheid state.
Determined to publish his images, he fled to the US in 1966, where his book appeared a year later. Acclaimed internationally, it was banned for 22 years in South Africa. Cole was prohibited from returning home and spent the next 20 years stateless.
He hoped to find freedom in America. Instead, he felt pigeonholeed as a Black photographer, dismayed at only ever being commissioned to document suffering.
He made hundreds of photographs of people in Harlem, often drawn to scenes that were impossible in South Africa. Mixed-race couples holding hands in public, young people of different races hanging out, neon signs offering 'Sex, sex, sex' rather than the 'Whites only' signs of segregation he documented at home.
Commissioned to take photos in the Deep South, he found the same suffering and racism he'd thought particular to South Africa.
In a letter to the Norwegian government requesting an emergency travel certificate to leave the US, he wrote:
'Exposing the truth at whatever cost is one thing. But having to live a lifetime of being a chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another.'
A life in fragments
For me, the most poignant moment of the film is the footage of Cole speaking in his own voice in a 1969 documentary. A slight man with a sorrowful gaze, he's seated at a table with prints of his photos:
'I've been banned in absentia, but that doesn't matter because it (his book) will stand in the future. Because I'm sure South Africa will be free.'
His youthful conviction is undercut by the presence, in his voice, of the weight of all he's experienced. Correspondence shows Cole's book was sent to government officials in the US and Europe, and to the United Nations, but it would take decades of resistance before apartheid fell.
Despite his fame and the support of leading international photographers, writers and editors, Cole's determination was ground down by the racism he encountered everywhere he went. Although he received grants to continue his work, he descended into poverty and depression.
By the mid-1980s, he stopped taking photos – his cameras were lost, stolen, or sold, and he learned that his belongings, including negatives and prints that he'd left in a hotel storage room in New York, had been discarded. Cole was destitute and ill.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he watched Nelson Mandela 's release from prison in 1990 from his hospital bed. Cole died in New York that same year. All his negatives and the work he'd made during his life in exile were thought to be lost.
Finding Ernest Cole
Peck's meditative film draws on Cole's notebooks and letters, along with research interviews, in a rather bold attempt to have him 'tell his own story'. It's a story driven by both curiosity and heartbreak, narrated by actor LaKeith Stanfield, whose rather jarring American accent gives voice to a South African experience.
Peck's script draws on interviews and research conducted by curator and researcher Gunilla Knape, who was associated with the Hasselblad Foundation, an organisation linked to the ongoing controversy over ownership of Cole's work.
In 2017, Cole's nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, received an email requesting that he travel to Sweden to discuss the return of items belonging to his uncle, discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm.
The film includes footage of Matlaisane's journey to Sweden and the bizarre scene that unfolds as Cole's archive is returned without any explanation about how it came to be either lost or found, or who'd placed it there.
The boxes included 60,000 negatives, and Cole's notebooks and research materials for House of Bondage. An incredible trove of history has resurfaced, but as Peck's film shows, Cole himself was irrecoverably lost in exile. DM