The story of Pretoria-born photographer Ernest Cole, who died in exile 35 years ago with one book of photographs and little else to his name, is still being recovered. The methods of this recovery are diverse.
Goodman Gallery in Cape Town is presenting an exhibition of vintage prints linked to Cole’s classic photobook House of Bondage throughout the month of February.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s latest documentary, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which is slated for local release in March, retells Cole’s extraordinary story through the incendiary photos he made of black life in 1960s apartheid South Africa.
For decades, Cole’s identity was synonymous with the 183 photos included in House of Bondage but the 2017 discovery of a huge cache of his negatives in a Swedish bank, and slow retrieval of his prints from various European archives, has enabled a more expansive view of his legacy to take shape.
Both the Goodman Gallery exhibition and Peck’s film provide a broader insight into Cole. Unavoidably, it implicates South Africa’s haunted past.
