House of Bondage

The exhibition ‘Ernest Cole – House of Bondage’ continues at Foam Amsterdam until June 14, 2023. This marks the first large-scale overview of the South African photographer’s oeuvre to include works from his long-lost archive.

Ernest Cole (1940–1990) is known for his powerful images documenting Black lives under apartheid, which was in effect in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. As one of the country’s first Black photojournalists, Cole (who freelanced for publications such as Drum, the Rand Daily Mail, The World, and the Sunday Express) offered an unprecedented inside view of life under a regime of institutionalised racial segregation, whose injustices he experienced first-hand. With courage and compassion, he captured the stark reality of racial segregation: workers inside mines, police controls, the demolition of townships – often shooting with a concealed camera, and risking his own life in the process.

In 1966, Cole fled South Africa to escape arrest – taking with him little more than the layouts for his book, House of Bondage, which was subsequently released in the US in 1967. The publication was an open indictment of apartheid and its atrocities, and was instantly banned in South Africa. As the photographer wrote at the time: “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.” Cole never returned to his home country. After an unsettled life in exile, he passed away in New York in 1990, one week after Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

The photographer’s seminal book project serves as the foundation for this comprehensive exhibition, along with excerpts from his archive, which was only rediscovered in 2017.