A few days back, I went to see the exhibition “Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile” at Autograph.
I discovered Cole’s photography in 2012 when I saw the exhibition “Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s”. This exhibition, held at The Barbican Centre in London, contained a set of original prints by Cole long thought to have been lost, but which had been recently rediscovered in Sweden.
The following text, which I have edited, is taken from the web page of the Autograph exhibition. What I find amazing about Cole, apart from his photos, is how someone so evidently talented could end up no longer taking pictures and dying in poverty and forgotten.
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Ernest Cole was born in South Africa in 1940 and died in New York City in 1990. During his life, he was known for only one book – House of Bondage – published in 1967. In 2011, the Hasselblad Foundation produced a follow-up: Ernest Cole: Photographer.
Cole’s early work chronicled the horrors of apartheid for Drum magazine and the New York Times, among numerous other publications. In 1966, he fled the Republic of South Africa. In 1968, the apartheid regime banned him in perpetuity, stripping him of his South African passport. Cole was briefly associated with Magnum Photos and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Time-Life. In America, he concentrated on street photography in urban settings.
Cole’s American social documentary images revealed a chasm. Disillusioned and isolated in exile, he began to realise that the systemic exclusion and segregation he experienced in South Africa was also prevalent in America. In his words, “It wasn’t any better: there was no freedom”.
Between 1969 and 1971, Cole regularly visited Sweden, where he became involved with the Tiofoto collective and exhibited his work. From 1972, Cole’s life fell into disarray, and he ceased to work as a photographer, losing control of his archive and negatives. Having experienced periods of homelessness, he died aged 49 of pancreatic cancer in 1990. In 2017, more than 40,000 of Cole’s negatives, which had been missing for more than 40 years, were discovered in a Stockholm bank vault. This work is now being examined and catalogued.
In 2022, House of Bondage was re-released by Aperture with an additional chapter, and for the first time, Cole’s photographs depicting Black lives in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s were published in 2024’s The True America.
Recording the truth at whatever cost is one thing but finding oneself having to live a lifetime of being the chronicler of misery, injustice, and callousness is another. Unfortunately, such matters are about the only work magazines here want to offer me.
— Ernest Cole
