How exiled photographer Ernest Cole captured apartheid’s human toll

Isabelle Martinetti with RFI

5 January 2025 at 5:28 am·1-min read

Photograph of segregational signs at a South-African train station taken by Ernest Cole in the 1960s.

Ernest Cole's haunting photographs of apartheid shocked the world and yet his own life ended in obscurity. Now, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck has brought Cole's story to the screen in Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. Speaking to RFI, Peck reflects on Cole's groundbreaking work and the exile that tore him apart.

"I remember the first photos. it was a long time ago in Berlin when I was studying," Haitian film director Raoul Peck told RFI.

"The anti-apartheid struggle was beginning, and Ernest Cole's photos were circulating a lot because it was the first time we discovered the horrors of apartheid at a human level, from the perspective of men and women."

Born in 1940, Cole fled South Africa in 1966 to escape the apartheid regime. He lived in exile in the United States, where he captured striking images of life in New York City and the American south.

His seminal work, House of Bondage – banned in South Africa – exposed the brutal realities of apartheid and earned Cole international acclaim at just 27 years old.

"He was seen, perceived as a black photographer, whereas he wanted to be a photographer like one of his idols, Cartier-Bresson," Peck explains.

"Ernest Cole's ambition was also to photograph, as he says, 'the human condition'."

Peck's film also tells the story of the wandering of Cole after his exile in 1966.

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