Ernest Cole

Updated on Sep 21, 2024

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Name Ernest Cole Role Photographer		Books House of Bondage

Died February 1990, New York, United States

The story of ernest cole a black photographer in south africa during apartheid

Ernest Cole (1940 - 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.

Ernest Cole Ernest Cole photographer of apartheid Al Jazeera America

Ernest cole trailer

Overview

Cole was a black South African, born in Eersterust in Pretoria, in 1940. He left school when the Bantu Education Act was put into place in 1953, and instead completed his diploma via correspondence. He started taking photographs at a very young age, and in the 1950s 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."

Ernest Cole Ernest Cole Photographer review Books The Guardian

In 1958, he applied for a job with Drum magazine. Jürgen Schadeberg, the picture editor, employed him as his assistant. Cole also started a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography.

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 radicalized 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." As a result, he was able to leave for New York City in 1966. He secretly took his apartheid project prints with him. 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), was banned in South Africa.

In the book, Cole writes: "Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate."

Later he 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. This was never published although he did take a number of photographs.

Cole later moved to Sweden, where he took up filmmaking. The apartheid photos he had taken were used extensively by the ANC in their various publications.

Cole died of cancer in New York City on 18 February 1990 at the age of 49.

Ernest Cole Award

The annual Ernest Cole Award was initiated in 2011 under the auspices of the University of Cape Town.

Publications by Cole

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. ISBN 0-394-42935-4. With an introduction by Joseph Lelyveld and a text by Thomas Flaherty.

The Photographer. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2010. Edited by Gunilla Knape. ISBN 978-3-86930-137-2. With essays by Struan Robertson and Ivor Powel.

Publications about Cole

Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa. Darren Newbury. Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2009. ISBN 978-1-86888-523-7. See Chapter 4. "An 'unalterable blackness': Ernest Cole's House of Bondage".

Documentaries

2006 - Ernest Cole – Video (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."

Selected group exhibitions

Photo-journalism exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Life Under Apartheid at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg

eye Africa (1960 to 1998) at the Castle's William Fehr Collection, Cape Town

Colour this Whites Only at the Tate Museum in London

2001 - Soweto – A South African Myth - Photographs from the 1950s (by Alf Khumalo, Ernest Cole and Jürgen Schadeberg). The core of the exhibition was the student uprising of 1976. This includes some of Peter Magubane's work.

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.

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.

2014 - Ernest Cole: Photographer - This exhibition was at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University in New York City. 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 organized by the Hasselblad Foundation of Gothenburg, Sweden.

References

Ernest Cole Wikipedia

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