Through the camera lens of Ernest Cole - new exhib

The photographs of Ernest Cole will be on display at Iziko South African National Gallery from 4 September until year end. Cole was an extraordinarily courageous young photographer who spent five years documenting everyday experiences of black South Africans under Apartheid in the 1960s.

Simply titled ‘Ernest Cole’, the exhibition is a commentary on many manifestations of Apartheid, as seen through Cole’s lens: the lives of migrant labourers recruited to the mines and the indignities that they were forced to endure, pass raids and arrests, the plight of domestic workers, ‘Bantu’ education, inadequate health care and poverty. The project culminated in the publication of House of Bondage in New York in 1967, negotiated by Magnum Photos, after Cole fled South Africa with a suitcase of his photographic prints. The immediate banning of the book in South Africa imposed permanent exile on the photographer, who was then only 27. In the United States he undertook a project funded by the Ford Foundation, but this never reached completion and Cole finally gave up taking photographs. He died in New York in 1990, shortly before his 50th birthday and a few days after the release of Nelson Mandela.

Although the negatives for his South African images were smuggled out by fellow photographer Struan Robertson, with whom Ernest Cole had shared a darkroom in Johannesburg, their current whereabouts are unknown. In 2005, the Iziko South African National Gallery was fortunate to be granted funding by the National Lotteries Board to acquire a small collection of his photographic prints, possibly made in preparation for the publication of House of Bondage. These are exhibited to honour the magnitude of Cole’s contribution to South African photography and his commitment to document the human spirit under Apartheid.

The exhibition can be viewed daily from 10:00–17:00, except Mondays.

Enquiries: Pam Warne, Tel: 021 467 4660, email: pwarne@iziko.org.za.

Images are from House of Bondage – Ernest Cole, 1967

• At assignment desk, clerk’s rubber stamp dictates mine where man will work, 1960-66.
• At the end of train ride comes a big squeeze as passengers must show their tickets before passing through narrow exit gates, 1960-66.
• Young boy is stopped for his pass as white plainclothesman looks on, 1960-66.

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