Goodman Gallery in Cape Town has cannily chosen to stage what is often regarded as a somewhat compromised art form as their gallery show over this year’s Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) — photography.
While the originally Joburg-based international gallery has shown considerable support for fine art photographers on its roster — they have recently showcased work by Jabulani Dhlamini and Lindokuhle Sobekwa — its longest-standing artist in the medium was the revered David Goldblatt.
The Cape Town gallery exhibition by Enerst Cole, one of the most important black protest photographers of the high apartheid era, is therefore not a major departure for Goodman. It concludes a three-part exhibition “Ernest Cole: House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust”. The first staging opened in Goodman’s London gallery in November 2024, there was a second exhibition at the Magnum photography gallery in Paris in January this year. This third and final Cape Town iteration opened on February 8 and presents rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career, curtailed by exile from apartheid SA in the 1960s and his early death, aged just 49, from cancer.
