Ernest Levi Tsoloane Cole (21 March 1940 – 19 February 1990) was a South African photographer. In the early 1960s, he started to freelance for clients such as Drum magazine, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Sunday Express. This made him South Africa's first black freelance photographer.

Early life

Cole was a black South African, born in Eersterust in Pretoria, in 1940. His original family name was Kole and he later took the name Cole. He left school when the Bantu Education Act was put into place in 1953, and instead completed his diploma via a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall, Oxford. He started taking photographs at a very young age, eight years old, and in the 1950s, he was given a camera by a Roman Catholic priest, with which Cole broadened his portfolio. As he himself put it: "I quit school in 1957 rather than go along with the 'bantu' education for servitude which had become more strict than before."

Career

In 1958, he applied for a job with Drum magazine. Jürgen Schadeberg, the picture editor, employed him as his assistant. Cole also started a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography. While working for Drum, Cole began to mingle with other talented young black South Africans—journalists, photographers, jazz musicians, and political leaders in the burgeoning anti-apartheid movement—and became radicalised in his political views. He soon decided on a project that entailed recording the evils and daily social effects of apartheid. He then worked at the Bantu World newspaper (later renamed The World – now The Sowetan), where he continued his career as a photographer. Seeking to leave South Africa, he became re-classified as a "Coloured," not "Black" because he was able to fool the authorities. As a result, he was able to leave for New York City in 1966. He secretly took his apartheid project prints with him. He showed his work to Magnum Photos and this resulted in a publishing deal with publishing rights owned by Random House. The resulting book, House of Bondage (1967), was banned in South Africa. In the book, Cole writes: "Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa have placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate." Later, Cole received a grant from the Ford Foundation for another book, A study of the Negro family in the rural South and the Negro family in the urban ghetto. Although he took a large number of photographs, this project was never completed nor were additional books published. As of 2020, photographs from this series began to be scanned and published. Cole subsequently moved to Sweden, where he took up filmmaking. The apartheid photos he had taken were extensively used by the ANC in their various publications.

Death

Cole died of cancer in New York City on 18 February 1990 at the age of 49.

Photographic legacy

Cole's negatives were considered lost for a long time, but a collection of 60,000 negatives was found at a bank vault in Stockholm and, in April 2018, given to his heirs, who had founded The Ernest Cole Family Trust. There are still 504 photographs held at Hasselblad Foundation, with an estimated value over one million euros, and the ownership of these is in legal dispute. As of 2020, the legal dispute between Cole's estate and the Hasselblad Foundation is ongoing. A cache of Cole's work having resurfaced in 2017, his book House of Bondage was reissued in 2022 by Aperture in New York, including a new preface by Mongane Wally Serote and "a selection of previously unseen photographs of creative expression and cultural activity in Black communities; a useful corrective to the uniform view of oppression and subjugation that had been its focus."

Ernest Cole Award

The annual Ernest Cole Award was initiated in 2011 under the auspices of the University of Cape Town.

Publications

Documentaries

Collections

Cole's work is held in the following public collections:

Exhibitions