The Anti-Apartheid Photographer Who Became Stranded in the United States
The article content you have refers to an excerpt from Hyperallergic focusing on South African photographer Ernest Cole. Cole’s work is renowned for its poignant portrayal of racial injustice under Apartheid and the profound impact his photography had on bringing these atrocities to the world’s attention.
### **Ernest Cole: Capturing the Struggles of Apartheid and Beyond**
South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940–1990) is one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century photography. Throughout his career, Cole revealed the cruel realities of South Africa’s Apartheid system through his striking black-and-white images, particularly in his seminal work, **House of Bondage** (1967). This collection, smuggled out of the country because of its controversial content, became the world’s first book-length visual documentation of Apartheid, exposing the daily suffering of Black South Africans to a global audience.
However, Cole’s story is bittersweet. Despite his early success, he fell into obscurity during his time in exile in the United States—a stark contrast to the reach and acclaim of **House of Bondage**. His American work, chronicled in **Ernest Cole: The True America** (2024), shows a less examined phase of his career, where his photography, though still beautiful and significant, struggled to maintain the social, political, and visual intensity that had made his earlier work iconic.
### **House of Bondage: A Visual Exposé of South African Apartheid**
**House of Bondage** was not merely a photography book; it became a visceral testament to the oppression suffered by Black South Africans under apartheid rule, where laws controlled nearly every aspect of life for non-White South Africans. Cole’s work went beyond the overt visual markers of oppression—it captured subtle moments of dignity and humanity amidst harrowing conditions. His ability to focus on mundane, everyday injustices, rather than monumental or chaotic events, revealed the persistent nature of apartheid’s stranglehold on South African society.
As stated in the article, following his success, Cole became a target of police surveillance by the South African government. His determination to leave his country with his negatives led to a dramatic flight into exile. Smuggled by American diplomats (some perhaps operating with intelligence intentions), his negatives left South Africa shortly before he did. Once in New York, Cole reunited with his images and published **House of Bondage**, which would forever cement his legacy as a powerful voice against racial oppression.
### **Exile and the Quest for a New Muse in the United States**
After leaving South Africa, Cole received funding from the Ford Foundation, funneled through the Institute of International Education (IIE), to document the lives of Black Americans in the late 1960s. This project, originally envisioned as an extensive exploration of African American life, took him across the United States, from Harlem to the Southern states, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
Yet, as **The True America** reveals, the photographs from this period never quite achieved the singular impact of Cole’s earlier work. While he documented significant historical moments, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and anti-war protests, there was a sense that his artistry had become “unmoored,” as Leslie M. Wilson describes it. Removed from the world he intimately understood in South Africa, Cole lost his muse—which explains why many of his American photographs, while visually exceptional, don’t do more than represent profound dislocation. His struggle to connect with the American landscape, alongside the psychological toll of exile, marked the beginning of his artistic decline.
### **A Story of Deception and Intrigue**
Even though **The True America** primarily serves as a collection of Cole’s American photographs, the text cannot be detached from the tangled web of politics, espionage, and intrigue that surrounded him. In reviewing this book, Wilson and others point to a potentially darker chapter in Cole’s American journey. Some of the diplomats and organizations that assisted his relocation might have had ulterior motives connected to intelligence gathering during the Cold War.
The article hints at Cole possibly becoming unwittingly entangled in U.S. intelligence networks, which were actively spying on the very social and civil rights movements that Cole was photographing. While there is no definitive evidence that Cole was used purposefully in these operations, the mere suggestion adds complexity and potential tragedy to his story. His funding, facilitated by IIE—a well-established conduit for CIA funds at the time—may have turned Cole from a brilliant photographer of human rights violations into a pawn of geopolitical espionage.
### **Rediscovery of Forgotten Photographs**
In 2017, the world rediscovered Cole’s American-era photographs when a Swedish bank, which had stored the collection for decades, turned them over to the Ernest Cole Family Trust. These images—many untitled and undated—cover his life between 1967 and 1972, reflecting the strained and unpredictable nature of his life in exile. Skeptics