By Jacob Mawela.
November 29, 2022 marked the ‘resurrection’ of a seminal tome once deemed a thorn on the side of apartheid – with the re-launching of the late South African photographer, Ernest Cole’s hard-hitting House of Bondage, at the Wits Art Museum.
First published in 1967, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage has been lauded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world for the first time and influencing generations of photographers around the globe. Reissued for contemporary audiences, this edition adds a chapter of unpublished work found in a recently resurfaced cache of negatives and re-contextualizes this pivotal book for our time.
Cole, a Black South African man, photographed the underbelly of apartheid in the 1950s and ’60s, often at great personal risk. He methodically captured the myriad forms of violence embedded in everyday life for the Black majority under the apartheid system—picturing its miners, its police, its hospitals, its schools.
In 1966, Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his negatives; House of Bondage was published the following year with his writings and first-person account. This edition retains the powerful story of the original while adding new perspectives on Cole’s life and the legacy of House of Bondage. It also features an added chapter—compiled and titled “Black Ingenuity” by Cole—of never-before-seen photographs of Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Made available again nearly fifty-five years later, House of Bondage remains a visually powerful and politically incisive document of the apartheid era.
Cole’s book showed from the vantage point of the oppressed how the system closely regulated and controlled the lives of the black majority. He saw every aspect of this oppression with a searching eye and a passionate heart.
House of Bondage is a milestone in the history of documentary photography, even though it was immediately banned in South Africa.
Not until the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg mounted enlarged pages of the book on its walls in 2001 were his people able to view these pictures, which are as powerful and provocative today as they were 50 years ago. Ernest Cole’s photographs are important because they relieve the tedium and go beyond precepts.
About photographer, Ernest Cole
Ernest Cole was born near Pretoria in 1940. Leaving school at 17 to become a photographer, he secured staff jobs and freelance assignments for newspapers and magazines for blacks—honing his skills with a correspondence course from the New York Institute of Photography. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Breton’s book The People of Moscow, in 1960 Cole embarked on a project to document the lives of his people which resulted in House of Bondage. Cole died in exile in 1990 as the regime was collapsing, never knowing when his portrait of his homeland would finally find its way home.
The newly-released hard cover is distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers and will be available at bookstores from December. It will retail for R1475.