Generational wealth: An archive of 60 000 negatives in a Swedish bank was published posthumously by the
Ernest Cole Family Trust through Aperture in the book The True America in 2023. Photo: Ernest Cole
“Christ chose his disciples, Earnest Cole’s disciples chose him,” photographer Andrew Tshabangu has said.
One of the most poignant aspects of contemporary culture is how often a remarkable talent who lived a short and often unfortunate life at some point begins to have a long death.
Long, in that their existence starts extending deeper the further time stretches from their death, and the influence they have on the present starts exceeding that which they had on the time in which they lived.
In art, unlike sport or commerce, there isn’t an empirical measure through which achievement can be logged in an absolute ledger. Art is in many ways defined mostly by its influence. While prizes help to create standards and define recognition, art is thankfully forever in discussion or argument about what is good, important, worthy, beautiful and essential.
In Africa though, opinion has generally voted with its heart, moving the body or voice in spontaneous response; one creative act following another is the first and most fundamental form of praise that exists here.
It is also where politics and economic barriers have led many of our most favoured creative souls to leave our sphere early. With a young death, there is not only the loss of opportunity to further evolve and develop an artistic language, there is also the loss of generational leadership.
Abdullah Ibrahim, having lived as long as he has, making music for all that time, has given the likes of Kyle Shepherd time to watch him and to grow out from his artistic soil. Not so Brenda Fassie, Johnny Dyani and Dumile Feni. They were all gone pretty much before they could pass on the torches they lit.
And so it was for Ernest Cole, the revered but almost forgotten South African documentary photographer who was forced into exile in 1966. Cole’s archive, assumed lost for more than a quarter of a century after his death in 1991, was suddenly and mysteriously revealed to his descendants in 2017 in a safety deposit box in a Swedish bank.
South African photographer Guy Tillim opined: “His work lay like eggs waiting to hatch years later.”
The series of subsequent publications and exhibitions has finally seen Cole elevated from social documentarian to a genuine fine artist.
He created the book House of Bondage, his master work, as a young man in South Africa, almost completely in isolation. His exile to New York to have it published cemented an artistic reputation almost completely separate from his contemporaries at Drum, like Bob Gosani and Peter Magubane.
The time in exile in New York was, however, so disheartening it appears there was no way for him to develop a thorough practice, let alone play mentor to those who grew up after him as, for instance, David Goldblatt did with the likes of Jo Ratcliffe and Santu Mofokeng, and many others who saw success in the art world.
What has set Cole apart is the clear influence his work has had on not just one but now three generations of South African photojournalists, while having met almost none of them. In the last 20 years of his life, spent mostly mysteriously in exile, he functioned as a semi-mythological figure for photographers such as Tillim, Omar Badsha and Rashid Lombard, a semi-ghostly presence on the outer limits of their then analogue knowledge. Famously, rare copies of the banned House of Bondage were seen only in secret, minor bursts of exposure to its brilliance before being bundled back into the boots of cars to lie silently in hiding.
“Cole came with my growing political awareness,” says Tillim. “House of Bondage was an explosive reckoning with reality. It was photography with a pass to witness.”
Much of the book’s effect had to do with the clarity of its intention, exposing so certainly — boldly and yet delicately — the sin that was apartheid. Cole had chosen the title House of Bondage as an incisive provocation to apartheid’s architects with their outrageous claims of divinity and biblical foundation.
He wanted to make it clear it had been designed and built by men and that, like any edifice, it could and would fall. The radical intelligence of these kinds of choices gave the book and Cole a heightened mystique that verged on the poetic.
Badsha, another who shared Cole’s sense of “using the camera for engagement”, said: “The publication of the book was groundbreaking for a black person,” remarking on the fact that no black photographer before Cole had found the space to create a body of work with as fully structured a narrative as House of Bondage due to the restrictions and censorship of the time. “I’d never seen a domestic servant reading before … he photographed ordinary people with a real sense of dignity.”
There was also the sheer audacity of the work, how the photographs had such direct access to the machinations of apartheid, such as the actions of the police and the behaviour of criminals.
Cole spoke of his various techniques and strategies, many of which seem to come straight from the sensational film noir narratives of the time: plugging his camera into a loaf of bread, injuring himself to gain access to a hospital and “changing race” so as to flit, spectre-like, through gaps in the racial laws, accessing far more of society than he could as a black man.
This was reminiscent of acts then deemed only fictional. In Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona and John Kani’s play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, the incredible irony unfolds of a man who, by stealing another man’s pass, believes he can erase himself from history as a way to remove himself from apartheid’s scope. In his own performance of disguise and identity, Cole displayed both cunning and a dark sense of humour, treating the process of racial reclassification as a kind of bureaucratic Dada.
Cole was an artist who was forced by circumstance to be an activist. He expressed this in the frustration he had with being commissioned to photograph African-American life with the same sense of liberal purpose House of Bondage had carried.
However, his interest in fashion, affection and sexual fluidity are as present in the Harlem period as the interest in poverty and the irony of signage that they share with the South African period. Cole, like so many black artists, wished for nothing more than to be liberated from the need to be liberated.
Novelist Phumlani Pikoli (another tragically early death) once said to me on this very subject, “The first step towards security for a black man is the surrender of aspiration.”
There is now, two decades after his death, a real momentum to the work Cole did. Not only in the work he made, but in the effect it keeps having on the generations that follow.
Tshabangu, who came to prominence in the Nineties, literally working in the wake of Cole’s death, describes coming to Cole through the influence of Mofokeng.
“I was introduced to the work by Victor Motau at the Alex Arts Centre in the early Nineties. He was spoken about by [lensmen] Jeff Mphathi and Struan Robertson. At one point, I wanted to be Ernest Cole so badly that Wally Mongane Serote and Santu had to sit me down and explain to me — he had run his race. I learned that I couldn’t forget myself in the process.”
There is this kind of double tragedy to Cole’s life that the newly discovered photos can only hint at — that he was unable to fulfil his full artistic aspirations both because of the limitations apartheid placed on him as a person and also because of being bred as a photographer under circumstances that gave him a key that fitted only that lock.
Mikhael Subotzky and Lindokuhle Sobekwa cite Cole as the key inspiration for developing an artistic body of work through the practice of photographic documentation.
As Sobekwa says, “His talent was vast. The work in America is like Garry Winogrand and other street photographers. I have also felt the frustration he felt of being boxed in, when I am commissioned and feel I’m being asked to merely repeat myself in the work.”
Subotzky finds Cole’s new work revelatory: “Even the colour photos of [Joburg’s] Wanderers Street that he took in the Sixties, bar the odd bit of signage and clothing, could have been taken today. It says so much of his insight then. And how much, unfortunately, has yet to change.”
“Once in a while, we have prophets, he was one of those,” says Tshabangu about Cole, tragically dead long before his time, facing the despair of exile. “Once in a while, there is a John Coltrane, a Nina Simone. He falls in there. He was one of those.”
