Ernest Cole South Africa. 1960.
“Ernest Cole’s life was full of turning points and disjunctures. In this sense, if in no other, he replicated the bizarre rise and fall of the apartheid regime from its infanc
(...) y in the 1940s to its death in 1990.
Cole’s photographs of apartheid South Africa – including this image – captured the brutality of ‘scientific’ racism, demonstrating both the humanity of South Africans and the ongoing revolutions of everyday life. Cole left the Republic in 1966 and published House Of Bondage in 1967, delivering, in the process, a body blow to the public image of the apartheid state. For his troubles, he was exiled in perpetuity and stripped of his identity.
Cole continued in the United States and Sweden with his photographic experiments in rendering the personal political and the political personal before appearing to abandon photography in the mid-1970s. Ernest Cole died in New York City in 1990, a few days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.”
– The Ernest Cole Family Trust © Ernest Cole | Magnum Photos
