Ernest Cole Archive: House of Bondage

Ernest Cole, a Black South African man, photographed the underbelly of apartheid in the 1950s and ’60s, often at great personal risk. He methodically captured the daily atrocities and indignities for the Black majority under the apartheid system – picturing its miners, its police, its hospitals, its schools. In 1966, at the age of twenty-six, Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his negatives. House of Bondage was published the following year with his writings and first-person account.

The book was promptly banned in South Africa, and Cole was exiled, settling in the United States. A new edition published by Aperture in 2022, retains Cole’s original writings and images, while adding new perspectives on his life and the legacy of House of Bondage, including a preface in the form of a lament by Mongane Wally Serote. It also features an added chapter of never-before-seen photographs of Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Cole had selected images for this section and titled it, “Black Ingenuity,” though it was never published in the original edition.

Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in a township called Eersterus near Pretoria which was later destroyed and the family moved to Mamelodi. As a photographer, a strong theme in his work was mining and the brutal system of migrant labour. He photographed a diverse range of life, including education, described as ‘Bantu education’ designed to keep black people subservient. Another theme was domestic workers. He explored the spiritual aspects of black life, and documented entertainment and rituals.

He was skilful in avoiding police detection and even changed his race classification to ‘coloured’ (a person of mixed race) and name to Cole, which allowed him to move more freely than African people, who were subject to curfews and the dreaded dompass. On one occasion he allowed himself to be arrested so he could take some of these photographs. Finally, after many years while working on a story about tsotsis (gangsters), the police threatened him with jail if he didn’t assist them. This prompted Ernest Cole to leave the country with his negatives.

After fleeing South Africa in 1966, he was banned from South Africa and settled in New York. He was associated with Magnum Photos and received funding from the Ford Foundation to undertake a project looking at Black communities and cultures in the United States. Cole spent an extensive time in Sweden and became involved with the Tiofoto collective. He died of cancer in 1990 at age forty-nine.

After he left South Africa and House of Bondage was banned, Cole like many other activists lived a difficult life in exile. He died one week after the release of Nelson Mandela and wasn’t able to return home to witness the advent of South Africa’s new democracy. In 2017, more than sixty thousand of Cole’s negatives – missing for more than forty years – resurfaced in Sweden.

Ernest Cole’s legacy, now digitized, offers South Africans and the world an opportunity to celebrate and understand one of South Africa’s most extraordinary photographers. The accessible digitized archives have made his legacy available for education, scholarship and research, and elevate Ernest Cole from the margins into the domain of world visual heritage.

The Photography Legacy Project will further digitize Cole’s recently found negatives, thought missing from the USA when he was commissioned by Ford Foundation to photograph Black life in the USA.