Ernest Cole, anti-apartheid photographer gets his due
A trove of vintage prints by the anti-apartheid photographer Ernest Cole, recently repatriated from Sweden’s Hasselblad Foundation to the artist’s family trust in South Africa, have begun a three-city, selling exhibition in London’s Goodman Gallery (until January 18 2025).
Cole (1940-90) made the works for his House of Bondage photobook, first published in 1967, the year after the artist fled South Africa — both he and the book were banned in the country. Cole managed to smuggle negatives and prints out, though the circumstances of how they came to be in Sweden are mysterious, to say the least. In 2017, some 60,000 negatives were found in a bank vault and returned to Johannesburg’s Ernest Cole Family Trust while earlier this year, the Hasselblad Foundation handed the trust nearly 500 vintage prints.
Included in the Goodman Gallery show are works from “The Mines” chapter of Cole’s book, for which he covertly snapped black labourers working and living underground. Another chapter, “Black Ingenuity”, includes images of the avant-garde artists of Cole’s time. This chapter was excluded from the 1967 publication but has been reinserted in Aperture’s updated House of Bondage (2022). The gallery is offering individual photos for between $12,000 and $15,000, with chapters available for up to $70,000 — four have already sold to a South African private foundation, the gallery confirms. Further exhibitions of the works will be at Magnum Gallery in Paris then Goodman Gallery in Cape Town at the start of next year.
