Ernest Cole is one of the greatest photographers you have (probably) never heard of. Raoul Peck’s documentary Ernest Cole: Lost and Found — released next week — tells the story of this long-term South African exile, and the title says it all.
In 1967, Cole published a collection of his photographs, House of Bondage, a revelatory, wide-ranging account of Black life in apartheid South Africa. Banned there, the book made Cole famous abroad, but only briefly. Leaving his homeland, never able to return, he died in 1990, largely forgotten after years of exile, mainly in New York.
Haitian director Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, TV documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes) lets his subject tell his own story, with the script credited both to Cole and to the director. LaKeith Stanfield voices the photographer’s words, his delivery emphasising the melancholy and fatigue of exile; Cole emerges as a writer of trenchant and poetic insight, although confusingly the film appears to mix his texts with extrapolations of his voice (towards the end, he narrates his own demise).
Archive footage includes film of the young photographer — dapper in beret and double-breasted jacket, his calm, searching look to camera adding weight to his assertion that one day his nation would be free. But Cole was so prolific that it has been possible for the feature substantially to consist of his still images. The House of Bondage pictures offer an encyclopedic account of Black people’s existence under apartheid: as servants and workers; in the awful “banishment camps” inhabited by the forcibly displaced; or on city streets, everywhere surrounded by signboards screaming “WHITES ONLY”. Cole’s photographs of Black life in the US are just as forceful, underscored by his realisation that, despite his dream of a land of freedom, this new country was in many ways not so different from his own.
Soundtracked with vintage South African jazz, the film is primarily about Cole’s career and the tragedy of his decline — solitary, stateless, often homeless. But the final section, featuring Cole’s nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, introduces the mystery of the 60,000 Cole negatives that turned up in a Stockholm bank vault, deposited by parties unknown — some of the holdings still having to be negotiated for by Cole’s family. He said of his work, “I don’t judge, I observe, sometimes amazed, sometimes appalled.” Peck’s film amazes and appals but, above all, inspires.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas from March 7