Ernest Cole – Photographer

Description

Ernest Cole (1940-1990) believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid. He identified intimately with his own people in photographs of unsurpassed strength and gravitas, with courage and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through the insanity of apartheid and its racist laws and oppression. In order to publish his book, House of Bondage, Cole went into exile. Immediately after it came out in 1967, it was banned in South Africa and this major critique of apartheid has hardly been seen in his own country since.

Cole died in New York after more than 23 years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few prints of his monumental work. Tio fotografer, an association of photographers with whom Cole worked from 1969 to 1975 when his place of residence was Stockholm, received a collection of his prints and these were later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation.

These extremely rare prints, most of them made by Cole himself and most never previously exhibited, form the core of this exhibion and book. This book tells the story of Ernest Cole’s life, both in his own words and through the reminiscences and writings of those people who knew him personally and professionally.