“Ernest Cole Photographer,” on view through July 7 at the Fowler Museum, brings 125 original, extremely rare black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Cole’s stunning archive to the United States for the first time.
One of South Africa’s first black photojournalists, Cole passionately pursued his mission to tell the world what it was like to be black under apartheid. Inspired by the photo-essays of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cole documented scenes of life under apartheid from 1958 to 1966. He captured everyday images, such as lines of migrant mine workers waiting to be discharged from labor, a school child studying by candlelight, parks and benches for “Europeans Only,” young black men arrested and handcuffed for entering cities without their passes, worshippers in their Sunday best, and crowds crammed into claustrophobic commuter trains.
A large majority of the images are shown for the first time in the way Cole had originally intended—un-cropped and accompanied only by his minimal remarks.
Cole was born March 21, 1940, in the black freehold township Eersterust, east of Pretoria. He became interested in photography as a teen and landed a position in Johannesburg as a darkroom assistant.
In the mid-1960s he set out, at great personal risk, to produce a book that would communicate to the rest of the world the corrosive effects of South Africa’s apartheid system. In 1966, Cole was arrested along with a group of petty thieves he had befriended in order to document their lives and means of survival. He quickly left South Africa for Europe and took with him little more than the layouts for his book. His photographs and negatives were separately smuggled out of the country shortly after.
Cole’s project was realized in 1967, when Random House in New York published “House of Bondage,” a graphic and hard-hitting exposé of the racism and economic inequalities that underpinned apartheid. Cole never found his feet in Europe or America and died homeless in New York in 1990 after more than 23 years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few photographic prints.
Also on view is a selection of art and election ephemera from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 bid for the presidency of South Africa.
Contact: (310) 825-4361 or visit fowler.ucle.edu.
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