South African freelance photographer Ernest Cole is perhaps best known for his photobook, House of Bondage, exposing images of 1950s and 1960s apartheid South Africa.Ernest Cole/The Associated Press
As South Africa’s first known freelance photographer, Ernest Cole’s life – like those of his fellow Black countrymen – was violently bound by the country’s apartheid laws. Cole’s photography was a bold witness to this regime, and, in 1966, Cole fled his homeland for New York, smuggled negatives in hand. A year later, he published his photobook exposing images of 1950s and 1960s apartheid South Africa, titled House of Bondage, allowing the Western world to see – often for the first time – the nation’s cruel segregationist realities.
House of Bondage was met with international acclaim and immediately banned in South Africa. In 1968, the country banned Cole in perpetuity and stripped him of his passport, leaving the photographer in exile. While Cole never published another photobook again, he continued to take photographs in New York, capturing vibrant, humanistic scenes of Black life.
In 2017, his nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, was made aware of 60,000 negatives of Cole’s, spanning his work in South Africa and the U.S., that had been held for years in a Swedish bank. With no record of how Cole’s work came to find itself stored away for decades, Matlaisane reached out to Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, best known for his Academy Award-nominated work on the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro and his 2000 biographical feature film, Lumumba.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is Peck’s new documentary to have emerged from this discovery of Cole’s work by his family estate. Centering Cole’s own voice and experiences as they were documented in his photography, diaries, and letters, the film is also a salient continuation of Peck’s work as an intentional archivist of global political struggles.
Following the premiere of Ernest Cole: Lost and Found at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year, The Globe and Mail sat down with Peck to discuss the documentary.
The overall structure of Ernest Cole: Lost & Found is very similar to I Am Not Your Negro – it feels almost like a sibling film in terms of how you are documenting Black life continually relocated. What was your thinking in terms of the use of voiceover narration in the film?
I knew that Ernest must be telling his story himself. In order to do that, I needed to figure out how to best understand him. His story ended up connecting to mine in a way that I didn’t envision – I realized very early on that I did in fact see some of Ernest’s photographs when I was in university in Berlin. It was in the 1970s – a time when we were constantly demonstrating together, not just for the anti-apartheid cause, but for global freedom movements in Latin America, Africa, Iran, and many other places.
At the same time, every narrative about Ernest was always focused on his move to the United States, the success of his book, and then his so-called “disappearance” and homelessness. I knew from my own history – my own life in exile, my own experience with existing in different territories at the same time – that you don’t just disappear, you don’t just become homeless. People think that you go into exile and you start a new life but, no, your old life is with you everyday.
South Africa banned Cole in perpetuity and stripped him of his passport in 1968, leaving the photographer in exile.Ernest Cole/The Associated Press
I think one of the trademarks of your work is your ability to allow people to provide their testimony and, also, to find their witnesses in history. I think it’s really notable that, in the film, we hear from Ernest after death – you’ve given him an afterlife.
It was important to me that he continued the narration up until the end of the film. And I knew that the ending had to be more than those previous narratives of Ernest’s life – it couldn’t just be a plunge of him into the darkness. And what could be more uplifting than when apartheid finally falls? I wanted him to be part of that – for him to return home and for his work to return home. For an artist, the most important thing is to know that your work is safe. For an artist to know that their work is intact and in good hands is a victory.
I love the way that you shot the contemporary footage, paralleling contemporary New York to past New York, as Ernest is paralleling New York to South Africa in his photography. It’s a really organic continuation of his work.
By definition, as an artist, you are working organically. My job was to find this organic feeling – it’s one that you can only get to by looking at everything you can and letting the material speak back to you. Being in front of 60,000 negatives allowed me to pick up on more of the elements I needed to tell the story.
I tried to understand his process through what I could decipher from the photos. Ernest wanted to be an artist, a photographer, period. South Africa was centre stage because that’s where he started and where he lived – that’s where the stories he knew were. He didn’t want to be pigeonholed into being “just” a Black photographer, which is what happened to him in New York. He says this incredible phrase in his notes, “I didn’t want to become the chronicler of misery,” and you understand the weight of that when you see his archive, his interests.
How do you navigate telling stories of the past which echo so closely to the present without falling into pessimism?
For me, we are not making films for people who are already politically convinced – on the contrary, we have to give people the tools to form their own opinions. This is an approach I keep with all of my films. It’s, firstly, about the fight – using cinema as a weapon – and, secondly, about reaching the largest number of people globally in order to make the present world more comprehensible.
I always try to do a sort of mapping with my work – to offer up all of the elements and possibilities and complexities in the histories I’m looking at – but it’s the audiences’s choice to pick those pieces up and do something with it or not. That’s also why I use personal stories as a form of testimony. I have to make sure that the work I am doing is work that people might pick up themselves when it is needed.
This interview has been edited and condensed.