Goodman Gallery is delighted to present the final iteration of a three-part exhibition ‘Ernest Cole: House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust’ in Cape Town. In collaboration with the Magnum Gallery, Paris and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, the exhibition presents rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.
Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications ‘House of Bondage’ and ‘The True America’, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work.
Part l of the exhibition took place at the London gallery last November. Part ll is on view at Magnum Gallery, Paris. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from ‘House of Bondage’, each exhibition has been unique in its selection of chapters on view.
Cole’s book ‘House of Bondage’, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street.
In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where 'House of Bondage' was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.
One of his most recognisable chapters from ‘House of Bondage’ is represented with a series of images from ‘The Mines’; Cole’s photographic essay captures the strategic and long-form effects of dispossession and racialised spatial division. A series of striking images in high contrast show the organisation and warehousing of black labour underground. Large groups of men photographed in tightly constrained space, allude to the contraction of economic opportunity and the dehumanising effects of the mine industry.
This series of images demonstrate banishment as a tool for political control and censorship. Taken at a remote detention camp, Frenchdale where inhabitants were banished without trial, the images are saturated with light taken in high exposure. Here Cole’s sitters are pictured alone, captured in solitary contemplation.
Littered amongst these spaces are their few possessions speaking to the absence of information and isolation of these remote spaces. Cole’s construction of space in these illustrates his sense of the ‘infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead’.
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His legacy continues to inspire artists dealing with the ongoing consequences of apartheid its racial and spatial segregation that persist to this day.
The Ernest Cole Family Trust is delighted to present to a global audience this rare series of vintage prints from its holdings in South Africa, featuring iconic and unseen images from Ernest Cole’s groundbreaking 'House of Bondage' series, to be exhibited in three shows in London, Paris, and Cape Town by both the Goodman Gallery and the Magnum Gallery. Lost to the family for many years they offer a new insight into Ernest’s seminal practice as South Africa’s premier anti-Apartheid photographer, and we hope that their inclusion in these shows will provide a new understanding of his work and legacy. - Leslie Matlaisane, Ernest Cole Family Trust
