Artist: Ernest Cole

Goodman Gallery presents part one of a three-part exhibition between the UK, Europe and South Africa by the late Ernest Cole. In collaboration with the Magnum Gallery, Paris and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust presents rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.

Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications House of Bondage and The True America, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l will take place at the London gallery this November. Part ll and lll will be shown in Magnum Gallery, Paris and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, respectively, in January and February next year. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from House of Bondage, each exhibition will be unique.

Cole’s book House of Bondage, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where House of Bondage was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.

Shown across all three cities for the first time is a body of work titled “Black Ingenuity”, a photo essay which was excluded from House of Bondage. Following the discovery of Cole’s archive and vintage prints in 2017, this essay has only belatedly recognised and situated Cole amongst the avant garde of the time. In a series of images taken in the informal and formal spaces permitted to Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Images of artists attending exhibition openings and racially mixed political rallies and dance troupes, offer a new way of looking at the grim but ever mutating world of apartheid.

A pair of images show Cole attending an exhibition opening of Gladys Mgudlandu’s landscape paintings possibly at the Adler Fielding Gallery, amongst artistic and literary milieu. Photographed are artists Dumile Feni and Louis Maqhubela, alongside journalist Nat Nakasa. A group, who like Cole (unbeknown to him at the time) would go on to live and work in exile outside of South Africa. Works in this chapter highlight Cole’s desire to acknowledge the cultural production at the time - with a particular focus on Johannesburg’s Dorkay House - a beacon of creativity as the home of African Music and Dance Association. The building was inextricably linked with the arts scene of the 50s and 60s - a period of great creativity where artists, musicians and actors found a safe space for artists to perform and develop talent outside of formal education and venues which were barred to them.

One of his most recognisable chapters from ‘House of Bondage’ is represented with a series of images from “The Mines”; Cole’s photographic essay captures the strategic and long-form effects of dispossession and racialised spatial division. A series of striking images in high contrast show the organisation and warehousing of black labour underground. Large groups of men photographed in tightly constrained space, allude to the contraction of economic opportunity and the dehumanising effects of the mine industry.

In contrast to the claustrophobia of ‘The Mines’, Cole’s photography in a chapter titled “Banishment’ presents life in exile. This series of images demonstrate banishment as a tool for political control and censorship. Taken at a remote detention camp, Frenchdale where inhabitants were banished without trial, the images are saturated with light taken in high exposure. Here Cole’s sitters are pictured alone, captured in solitary contemplation. Littered amongst these spaces are their few possessions speaking to the absence of information and isolation of these remote spaces. Cole’s construction of space in these illustrates his sense of the ‘infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead’.

Cole’s images of Black South African experience under apartheid, demonstrate remarkable skill. Working clandestinely, Cole was able to produce striking compositions that effectively communicated the psychological effects of oppression and created space for vital story telling, paving the way for successive generations of activist and front line photographers from South Africa. His legacy continues to inspire artists dealing with the ongoing consequences of apartheid its racial and spatial segregation that persist to this day.

The Ernest Cole Family Trust is delighted to present to a global audience this rare series of vintage prints from its holdings in South Africa, featuring iconic and unseen images from Ernest Cole’s groundbreaking House of Bondage series, to be exhibited in three shows in London, Paris, and Cape Town by both the Goodman Gallery and the Magnum Gallery. Lost to the family for many years they offer a new insight into Ernest’s seminal practice as South Africa’s premier anti-Apartheid photographer, and we hope that their inclusion in these shows will provide a new understanding of his work and legacy. - Leslie Matlaisane, Ernest Cole Family Trust

Ernest Cole (b, Transvaal, South Africa, 1940; d. New York, 1990) is best known for House of Bondage, a photobook published in 1967 that chronicles the horrors of apartheid. After fleeing South Africa in 1966, he became a “banned person,” settling 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 at age forty-nine of cancer. In 2017, more than sixty thousand of his negatives—missing for more than forty years—resurfaced in Sweden. In 2022, House of Bondage was reissued by Aperture with The True America, and never before seen images of the United States of America, published in 2023.