Ernest Cole Summer in the City. Harlem, New York, USA.
“Ernest Cole must have cheered the first time he saw the 'uncapping' of the fire hydrants in New York City. There is hardly a more traditional visual tr
(...) ope of an urban summer, but it is a symbol which says so much: there is the anti-institutional rebellion inherent in the uncapping, there is also the relief that the water provides from the heat. There is the illegality and the tolerance of the illegality. Finally, the uncapping symbolically represents the moment when the city just gets too hot: it boils over. It is the response of the people to the urban environment.
Such a cultural tradition would be unimaginable in the deeply conservative, heavily-policed South African capital of Pretoria, from where Cole had travelled only a few years earlier. There is an equivalent image in Cole's South African work: it shows children playing in the spray of a water sprinkler — amid 'the hissing of summer lawns' as Joni Mitchell described it. The opportunistic use of the water sprinkler is a stolen pleasure rather than an act of volition. The difference between the uncapping and the sprinkler is the difference between control and abandon.”
– James Sanders, estate of Ernest Cole © Ernest Cole | Magnum Photos
