The photographer Ernest Cole was born in the year 1940 in the Pretoria township of Eersterust in the year prior to the time that the apartheid system was officially introduced to South Africa in 1948.
He was just 20 when a crowd of thousands were gathered in front of the Police station located in Sharpeville township to protest against being compelled to carry passes by the minority white government. On the day, around 69 people were killed hun,dreds were wounded, and a state of emergency was declared. Sharpeville Massacre The Sharpeville Massacre is widely regarded as an important turning point in the struggle for freedom from oppression in South Africa. It was the start of a long period where photographs of the human rights violations within South Africa would rarely be absent from the world news.
Cole’s photographs are prominent in this reportage. However, unlike his contemporaries, he chose not to concentrate on documenting protests.
However, Cole produced hundreds of images that showed the brutality of apartheid’s structure in a stunning manner. He planned to publish the photographs in a book that was destined to be distributed across the world. The year was 1966. Cole was forced to leave South Africa with exile permission. Cole would never return.
House of Bondage Cole’s unflinching, comprehensive criticism of apartheid was released by the year 1967 both in the US as well as afterward in the UK. The first time it was published in the UK, the photobook was prohibited from South Africa, but some of its photos made it back into South Africa through resistance publications.
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The book is now widely available again, with a new edition on the market. It returns Cole’s profound visual essay to the public eye and draws attention to his incisive critique of the violence of everyday life under apartheid.
A must-read book
After departing South Africa, Cole continued to be a photographer within the US and also spent his time in Sweden. In the decade of the 1980s, House of Bondage was out of production. The location of the photos that he took in the US during the late 1960s and 1970s, including some ordered through the Ford Foundation and the United States Information Agency, was undiscovered. In 2017, at least a portion of his archives were located at the Swedish archives in Sweden, and it was given back to his family.
The discovery of more than 60,000 negatives and other documents, like notebooks, have resulted in the release of a new edition of Cole’s acclaimed publication from the Aperture Foundation.
Ernest Cole. (c) Ernest Cole Family Trust/Wits Historical Papers/Photography Legacy Project
It also includes three brand-new introduction essays. However, the main of the book stays the same. It’s a meticulous, unstoppable journey through the ruined world that apartheid created. It’s broken down into 15 sections comprising The Mines, Police and Passes Education for Service, Heirs of Poverty, and Banishment, all viewed through Cole’s observant eye.
The new edition also has an unpublished section of photographs that Cole was believed to have envisioned to use for House of Bondage but might have left out in order not to undermine the main message of the book. The section titled Black Ingenuity comprises 30 photographs of dancers, musicians, boxers, and artists. They illustrate how spaces for creative and social interaction were created even in the face of apartheid.
The Homecoming
A portion of the documents given by members of the Cole family was digitally digitized and made accessible online through the Photography Legacy Project as well as The Historical Papers Research Archive.
In Cole’s countless letters and press cuttings, there is an old notebook filled with notes written by hand about the struggles of life for black people during apartheid. In this tiny book, Cole describes the lives of the people he encountered as he sought to record South Africa’s dehumanizing “crucible of racism thoroughly.”
Cole’s notebook. (c) Ernest Cole Family Trust. Courtesy Wits Historical Papers/Photography Legacy Project
Cole shows himself to be an accomplished journalist who has a keen attention to the particular. Archives reveal the vast study that was required to make House of Bondage. The meticulous notes he took contain accounts of workers, mothers, and educators … What happened when an unlucky young man lost his passbook and was scared to report it and thus was unable to take his exam? There aren’t any chairs or desks for students at school. What woman has ever had the opportunity to purchase only one skirt throughout her working career?
Cole lived for decades as an undocumented person, and suffering from the discrimination that he experienced during his time in South Africa as well as in the US and Europe, he was afflicted with mental depression. In the late 1970s, Cole was homeless and slept in the subways of New York and occasionally at shelters or the homes of his friends. He passed away from pancreatic cancer after being exiled in 1990.
