Ernest Cole: Lost and Found — A profound portrait of the artist in exile

There is probably no single figure in modern South African art whose life and work has been subject to more speculation than the documentary photographer Ernest Cole. 

His reputation as both an artist and an activist seems to have been in permanent and revolving re-assessment since 1967 when he first emerged precociously, at the age of 27, with the publishing of House of Bondage, his phenomenal photojournalistic takedown of apartheid.

House of Bondage is still one of the most remarkable books of social documentation ever published. A forensic photographic testimony to the horrendous nature of apartheid, it was lauded both for its exceptional aesthetic quality as well as its comprehensive witnessing of the system. 

The legitimacy of its then unique African perspective was enhanced by a delicate empathy and forceful poetic power that seemed to drive the imagery brilliantly from the inside out. This lent the project a charged and emotional quality that gave it a radical immediacy in the case against a government perpetuating a systemic crime against humanity.

To do so, Cole had been forced to flee from South Africa to New York on a one-way exit visa, smuggling many of the negatives and layout sketches for the book on his person. 

Published by Random House, and sold out in its first 9 months to unparalleled acclaim, the book was a tremendous accomplishment. 

The ironies of being celebrated for documenting an unnecessary tragedy to which he had personally been subjected, coupled with the rupture of his exile, seemed to turn the experience of its publication from a calling card to an artistic albatross which burdened Cole for rest of his life, the second half of which was then spent in exile between Sweden and America.

For the two decades after House of Bondage, Cole’s life slowly deteriorated as he struggled to survive there both psychologically and economically. Attempts to continue his career as a photojournalist failed, with various commissions and funding proposals on African-American communities apparently abandoned and incomplete. 

Fuelled by the unsettling, erratic experiences of a few determined South Africans who came to find him in the eighties, rumours spread through the anti-apartheid artist community of a once startling talent bent and broken by his excommunication.

Finally, in 1990, in New York, where he had been an itinerant and reluctant resident for nearly as long as he’d been a black South African under apartheid, Ernest Cole died suddenly of cancer, holding his mother’s hand, only a few months before he would have turned 50, and just two weeks after the release of Nelson Mandela. 

House of Bondage remained his only book published in his lifetime.

To further add to the misery of this, Cole’s extensive body of work, both from South Africa and the years in exile had been deemed lost in the various iterations of loose living arrangements he’d made after leaving South Africa. The great shock for many was in how such a reputably fastidious and careful personality had seemingly abandoned both his career and legacy.

Then, in 2017, Earnest Cole’s descendants and their representatives were contacted by a Swedish bank to hand over the contents of a safety-deposit box in their care. In it were the almost unbelievably well-organised professional contents of Cole’s career, including some of his correspondence with funders and friends, but more crucially 60 000 unprinted negatives of the work he’d made in America as well as other residue material from the time spent making House of Bondage. 

Incredibly, the bank handed this over without explanation as to its provenance nor as to who had initiated and paid for its safekeeping; only that it needed to be taken from their care immediately.

This remarkable find, an ironic treasure trove of cultural riches, has since then been slowly and wonderfully reiterated by The Ernest Cole Family Trust. 

Under the guidance of Cole’s nephew Leslie Matlaisane and London art dealer James Saunders, the discovery has manifested into a series of international exhibitions and publications, the most recent and startling being the photo book, The True America, the until-now unseen collection of photos taken on commission in the South, but more exceptionally, in Harlem in the vivid splash of counter cultural energy it experienced in the sixties and early seventies. 

The True America stands in stark contrast to F Scott Fitzgerald’s notorious statement that “… there are no second acts in American lives”.

The discrepancy of this, some kind of American life not quite lived, and not quite by an American, is one of the chosen plot points around which a new documentary film on Cole by renowned Haitian-American filmmaker Raoul Peck seems to revolve. 

Ernest Cole: Lost & Found — which premieres in South Africa at The Joburg Film Festival on 11 March — is the first film on Cole since the remarkable events of the newly discovered negatives and their attendant mysteries and controversies. It is a bold and highly engaging contemporary documentary, determined to function as both biography and drama, chiefly concerned with two often overlooked aspects of his life.

The first aspect being Cole as an artist having to contend with the status that seemed to have been imposed upon him by white liberals as a one-size-fits-all civil rights activist — that he could somehow magically transliterate his anti-apartheid photography into a similar kind of messaging about the Jim Crow South or the Harlem of Malcolm X and Black Power. 

The second, more unique and somewhat controversial aspect, being to see Cole mainly from the point of view of his exile, rather than only as a South African who lived and worked in America. 

This distinction of exile as a particular condition, as its own form of a national identity, transcending one’s origin story and presenting it as a country of the soul, while initially discomforting, is a choice that ultimately feels courageous, disarming and most importantly ringing with truth.

Peck, from the outset, makes the choice of a first-person voice-over that he audaciously credits as scripted by himself and Cole, being a text drafted from published interviews and writings, as well as anecdotes and apocrypha from his own research interviewing many who met Cole in Sweden and New York. 

He adds to this “controversy of veracity” by having this read by an African-American, LaKeith Stanfield, star of brilliantly contemporary African-American work such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Donald Glover’s Atlanta.

Peck has spoken openly about this choice, stating that only by seeing Cole through his own eyes could he create a genuinely heartfelt truth about this complex narrative. 

The impression I was left with is that the filmmaker went looking into his and Cole’s common experience as black male documentarians who were both forced into exile —Peck moved to America to escape François Duvalier’s murderous regime in Haiti — looking to forge a legitimate route to a truth, if not the truth. 

In this way, one gets a sense of a genuine attempt to know what Ernest Cole’s photographs might have meant to him, rather than what they might mean to others.

While there are technically as many meanings and responses to a photograph as there are viewers, what most of us crave in the artistic biography is to know the intentions and motivations of the creator themselves, a voyeuristic desire that isn’t always easy to admit. 

Having already made another great film on a black activist-poet, the Oscar-nominated James Baldwin biography I Am Not Your Negro, Peck is aware this is extremely tricky terrain. The strategy, however, feels daring and the film hums with a dramatic tension that builds out of such obvious events such as the discovery of the negatives, through Cole’s descent into alienation as an outsider on the hard pavements of Manhattan.

In one of the film’s most moving moments, in his meeting in the late eighties with South African photographer Rashid Lombard, Cole, who claims not to have held a camera for over a decade, suddenly asks for the one Lombard has been using to take pictures of him and takes one solitary shot of Rashid in reply. 

The film leaves the moment hanging, implying that this casual portrait of a fellow black South African photographer, who has come desperately to either pay homage or be given some rare secret, may not just be evidence of the last of the master.

Here, abruptly dispensing with the cynicism of words, Cole seems, with both resignation and purpose, however hopelessly it might seem in light of all he suffered through, to pass on through the simple, complex haptic diction of pressing the shutter, the will that others will find in the craft what he has so vainly struggled to maintain. And in that act, as a viewer, one is overwhelmed by the enormous power of the camera as a machine of love.

Photography is a very difficult subject to make a motion picture about. While it is no profound revelation that photography is both a recording of the outside world and the inside universe, of both the subject and the photographer, it can be very complicated to show that as a novel form of human contact, when one is having to use that exact technology. 

In Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, one watches a deeply sensitive, maligned and exiled man struggle to maintain a faith in that, but in these lost photographs, the struggle is real, and the will to love is ever-lasting.