Department of Arts , Culture and Heritage - Cole lays bare apartheid insanity

Cole lays bare apartheid insanity

In his deeply moving pictures, photojournalist Ernest Cole showed how the oppressive system of apartheid affected the psyche of Africans. Years later, they are on show for the first time.

Earnest boy squats on haunches and strains to follow lesson in heat of packed classroom. [Caption from House of Bondage]

APARTHEID atrocities, prejudice, forced removals and other social hardships are some of the complex issues documented in the photographs by Ernest Cole, now on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG).

Entitled Ernest Cole - The Photographer, the exhibition comprises about 150 of the photojournalist’s compelling fine silver prints, most of which evoke poignant memories of apartheid South Africa and how the system affected the psyche of ordinary people. The pictures have been sourced from Sweden.

They have not been exhibited elsewhere in the world and Johannesburg is the opening venue for what is to be a world tour. The exhibition is scheduled to tour four South African cities, stopping at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth, Durban Art Gallery and the library at the Mamelodi Campus of the University of Pretoria. It will then move to the Hasselblad Centre in Sweden before embarking on a European and American tour.

Organisers say the travelling exhibition is the first of its kind in the country and is the largest exhibition of Cole’s work ever staged. Photographs on exhibition are “of unsurpassed strength and gravitas. They reflect Cole’s intimate identification with his own people,” notes Tiny Malefane, the gallery’s public programmes manager.

According to a press statement from Malefane, Cole believed passionately in his mission to use photographs to tell the world what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid. “With courage and compassion his lens penetrated the depth and extent of the insanity of apartheid and how its racist laws oppressed the lives of black people,” explains Malefane.

A book of the same name, co-published with Steidl Verlag; about 120 pictures from the Hasselblad Foundation’s Cole collection; a biography written by Cole in 1966; a biography covering the South African years by Struan Robertson; a short reminiscence by Keorapetse Kgositsile; an essay putting Cole and his work into the context of the time by Ivor Powell; and a report from the research done by Gunilla Knape form part of the exhibition.

“For the first time the full weight and quality of [Cole’s] photography will be seen in what is probably the largest exhibition of his work ever staged. The prints on show are fine silver prints, most of them made as exhibition prints, probably by Cole himself,” reads the Hasselblad Foundation’s website.

Hasselblad Foundation

The foundation, custodian of Cole’s work, notes that his photographs were inspired by poets, writers, artists and musicians. “The pictures are really stunning and touching,” it says. Most of the photographs on display are uncropped and individually presented. “They reveal the complex interaction of the strength, subtlety and elegance of Cole’s photographic seeing.”

Cole’s caption unknown.(This is almost certainly from a shebeen in Pretoria’s Riverside, just outside Eersterust from which pictures of the same people were published in Drum, May 1962.)

Cole was born in the coloured township of Eersterust, northeast of Pretoria, in 1940. His family was relocated to the sprawling township of Mamelodi under the Group Areas Act in 1960. This is when he started to use photography to document how apartheid affected Africans.

While in Mamelodi, he worked as an assistant to a Chinese studio photographer, where he learned the intricacies of photography and obtained an old reflex camera. He worked as a photographer for Drum magazine and later became South Africa’s first black freelance photographer, freelancing for Rand Daily Mail newspaper, The World newspaper and Sunday Express.

Cole was banned from South Africa after he went abroad to publish a book titled House of Bondage – his only published work of photography. In the book, he wrote: “Three hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.”

He lived in Stockholm, Sweden between 1969 and 1975, and died in New York in 1990. During his time in Sweden, he was cared for by a photographer who received a collection of some of his fine silver prints. “This set of extremely rare prints, most of them made by Cole himself, were subsequently donated to the Hasselblad Foundation,” says Malefane.

The exhibition will enable visitors to look at Cole in the perspective of international photography, explains the foundation. “Not simply for his remarkable courage and determination in the face of state oppression, but for the perceptiveness of his seeing eye and his ability to put what he saw into photographs of remarkable rigour, subtlety and elegance.”

Some of Cole photographs are on the foundation’s website.

Ernest Cole - The Photographer opened on 19 September at the JAG. It will run until 21 November.

The JAG is on King George Street in Joubert Park, sandwiched between Wolmarans and Noord streets. It is open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 5pm. For more information about the exhibition, telephone Tiny Malefane at the gallery on 011 725 3184, or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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