Ernest Cole | House of Bondage

Ernest Cole

House of Bondage

New York City, USA: Aperture, 2022

232 pp., 21.5 x 29 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

Last night I went to see Raoul Peck's documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, which was essentially an adaptation of an artist’s book. Cole was South Africa's first black freelance photographer and House of Bondage (originally published in 1967) was his only publication. 

The book features eighteen photoessays about life under apartheid, including mining, education, domestic work, healthcare and banishment. To avoid arrest, many of the images had to be taken surreptitiously, with Cole learning to shoot discreetly, from the waist. 

“That was the first time you basically have a camera inside the belly of the beast,” said Peck.

House of Bondage was instantly banned in South Africa and the photographer, 27 at the time, was exiled. Smuggling his negatives with him, Cole fled to live in New York, which he describes as a "soulless city.” He continued to take photographs, but never made another book. The film follows what he describes as his “slow disintegration and descent into hell”, living in rooming houses and sometimes on the street. 

Cole died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 49, in 1990 - a week after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. 

Almost thirty years later, in 2017, 60,000 negatives of his work were mysteriously discovered in a Swedish bank safe, along with research materials and writings by the artist. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found consists almost entirely of these still b&w images, and Cole’s own words, narrated by Actor LaKeith Stanfield (the star of Sorry to Bother You).

This 2022 expanded edition of House of Bondage makes use of some of these newly discovered images, and is also supplemented by a text by MoMA curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who observes: "Deftly harnessing image and text, Cole mines the grounds upon which Black life in South Africa during the twentieth century was surveilled, regulated, and subjected to forms of punitive existence. His lucid analysis and sophisticated visual grammar produces a blistering critique that reverberates not through the register of the spectacular, but rather through the relentless documentation of so-called unremarkable scenes".