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The first South African freelance photographer, Cole became radicalized by associations with other talented young black South Africans—journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement—and applied himself to chronicling the evils and daily social effects of apartheid. Able to escape South Africa, he fled to New York City with his negatives and prints and enthused Magnum Photos to help him secure a publishing deal with Random House, resulting in House of Bondage (1967), which at the time became the definitive exposé of apartheid. The images of House of Bondage achieved a global audience.
But his experience of the United States proved to be disquieting, unsettling, as the promise he anticipated capsized into disillusioned awareness that racism was as rampant in the United States as it had been in South Africa, if not even more dangerous. Unable to return home to South Africa, his life became a race against expiring visas and diminishing economic resources. Commissioned by the Ford Foundation to chronicle Black family life in the rural South and the urban ghetto from “an outsider’s perspective”, Cole questioned what was expected of him and how it could be presumed that he was ever an outsider when what he witnessed in the impoverished lives of Blacks in America proved no different than what he had witnessed and chronicled in South Africa. “I’m homesick,” he repeated frequently, “but I can’t go home.”
He gave up photography. Became lost and homeless (thus, the “lost” of the film’s title). His film negatives likewise disappeared (a compounded loss). Cole died of cancer at the early age of 49, never able to return home to South Africa, never able to adjust to his exile. The “found” part of the film’s title proved to be the mystery at the core of Cole’s biography and the film’s suggested future traction. In April 2018, Cole’s heirs—namely a nephew who had founded the Ernest Cole Family Trust—were notified by a Swedish bank that a collection of 60,000 meticulously archived negatives had been discovered in a vault in Stockholm. The bank was not forthcoming in disclosing who had placed the negatives in the vault or who had paid for their storage, but included were many of the original negatives he had taken in South Africa and several notes that helped shape House of Bondage. How had they ended up in Sweden? Why was the bank so tight-lipped, claiming they had no records of who deposited and paid for the storage?
Further, the Hasselblad Foundation has clung to 504 of Cole’s photographs, whose estimated value is in the neighborhood of one million Euros. The ownership of these is in legal dispute, with the Hasselblad Foundation refusing to relinquish the photos to Cole’s estate until they can prove ownership. As of 2020, the legal dispute between Cole's estate and the Hasselblad Foundation is ongoing.
Peck’s documentary reveals an artist whose initial energy awakened the world to the injustice of apartheid but who was himself undermined by the judgmental machinations of racism that left him tethered to a miserable past that he was doomed to repeat in America. The psychological price of exile crippled his spirit and, in turn, his artistry. One can only imagine what he might have accomplished had he been able to feel at home in the United States and if he had received the support he needed and deserved. It never ceases to amaze and anger me that frequently it isn’t until an artist is dead that their work gains the financial value that would have benefited the artist while alive. Peck’s film has at least provided some recompense by insuring that Cole is not forgotten, not the least of which is attention to an earlier documentary on Cole’s life made by Jürgen Schadeberg, available in its entirety on YouTube. In 1958, Jürgen Schadeberg, the picture editor of Drum magazine, employed Cole as his assistant. That experience shaped Cole’s artistry. In conjunction, Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found and Schadeberg’s earlier work Ernest Cole underscore what has been found in Cole’s life and effectively labor to offset what was feared and believed lost.
