Ernest Cole: House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust - Part 3

Goodman Gallery is delighted to present the final iteration of a three-part exhibition ‘Ernest Cole: House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust’ in Cape Town. In collaboration with the Magnum Gallery, Paris and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, the exhibition presents rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.

Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications ‘House of Bondage’ and ‘The True America’, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l of the exhibition took place at the London gallery last November. Part ll is on view at Magnum Gallery, Paris. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from ‘House of Bondage’, each exhibition has been unique in its selection of chapters on view.

Cole’s book ‘House of Bondage’, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where House of Bondage was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.