Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

The South African photographer Ernest Cole won international acclaim for his 1967 book House of Bondage, which captured searing images of apartheid from a Black perspective. In his twenties, Cole was exiled in the United States and Europe, bearing witness to other varieties of racism. He lost his bearings and fell out of sync with the photo editors and arts foundations that had supplied his line of support. He experienced homelessness and died from cancer in 1990, just days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

That might have been the end of his story until a revelation in 2017, when 60,000 unknown negatives of his work were discovered in a Swedish bank vault. Through all his adversity, Cole never lost his power to take stunning pictures, trying to see those who spend their lives going unseen. “It’s a matter of survival,” he wrote, “to steal every moment.”

The archive is overseen by Cole’s nephew, Leslie Matlaisane. He reached out to Raoul Peck, whose films Lumumba (TIFF ’00) and I Am Not Your Negro (TIFF ’16) explore oppression and resistance on a parallel track to Cole’s work. Peck draws upon Cole’s private writings to craft a script voiced by actor LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah) that brings the photographer to life.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found leads the way for a new generation to understand Cole’s work. The film won the Cannes film festival documentary prize, L’Œil d’or. And, finally, this year a new book of Cole’s long hidden photography has been published: The True America.

THOM POWERS