Library Weekly

On 21 March 1940, South African photographer Ernest Levi Tsoloane Cole was born. In the early 1960s, he started to freelance for clients such as Drum magazine, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Sunday Express. This made him South Africa's first black freelance photographer.

While working for Drum, Cole began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans—journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement—and became radicalised in his political views. He soon decided on a project that entailed recording the evils and daily social effects of apartheid.

Seeking to leave South Africa, he became re-classified as a "Coloured," not "Black" because he was able to fool the authorities. As a result, he was able to leave for New York City in 1966. He secretly took his apartheid project prints with him. He showed his work to Magnum Photos and this resulted in a publishing deal with publishing rights owned by Random House. The resulting book, House of Bondage (1967), was banned in South Africa.

Cole's negatives were considered lost for a long time, but a collection of 60,000 negatives was found at a bank vault in Stockholm and, in April 2018, given to his heirs, who had founded The Ernest Cole Family Trust. There are still 504 photographs held at Hasselblad Foundation, with an estimated value over one million euros, and the ownership of these is in legal dispute. As of 2020, the legal dispute between Cole's estate and the Hasselblad Foundation is ongoing.

Cole died of cancer in New York City on 18 February 1990 at the age of 49.

(Source Wikipedia, accessed on 20 March 2025)

Selected Publications 

Cole, Ernest, House of bondage, (New York, 1967).

Goldblatt, David, en Ivan Vladislavić, TJ, Johannesburg photographs, 1948-2010, (Rome, 2010).

Grantham, Tosha, Isolde Brielmaier en Tumelo Mosaka, Darkroom: photography and new media in South Africa, (Richmond, 2009).

Heseltine, Bryan, en Darren Newbury, People apart: 1950s Cape Town revisited, (London, 2013).

Schadeberg, Jürgen, en Tshegofatso Sehlodimela, Jürgen Schadeberg: South Africa: six decades, (Pretoria, 2013).

Mofokeng, Santu, Santu Mofokeng: a silent solitude: photographs 1982-2011, (Italy, 2016).

Morrill, Rebecca (eds.), African artists: from 1882 to now, (London, 2021).

Mthethwa, Zwelethu, Isolde Brielmaier en Okwui Enwezor, Zwelethu Mthethwa, (New York, 2010).

Newbury, Darren, Defiant images: photography and apartheid South Africa, (Pretoria, 2010).

Sall, Amy, Zoé Samudzi en Yasmina Price, The African gaze: photography, cinema and power, (London, 2024).

Williamson, Sue, Resistance art in South Africa, (Cape Town, 1989).

Films

Schadeberg, Jürgen, en Claudia Schadeberg, Ernest Cole: 1940-1990 photo journalist (Blairgowrie, 1999).

Insight | Ernest Cole (with Mark Sealy)