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Abstract
Ernest Cole’s photographs reveal the contradictions and paradoxes of apartheid South Africa. At a very young age, and with little formal instruction Cole instinctively produced a significant documentary photo-book titled House of Bondage (1967). This article makes a close reading of some of Ernest Cole’s photographs in relation to the historical circumstances of apartheid and how they can be perceived through the lens of hindsight in postapartheid South Africa. The work offers a potent argument for the power of perception to uncover overlooked moments of the period. As an African, Cole’s photographs construct a narrative of apartheid from the position of an “invisible” black insider. In so doing, they tellingly reveal how he used the system of apartheid to his own advantage in his photographic practice. His photographs ask us to consider his modus operandi and the courage it took to make them at that time, offering the opportunity to behold moments that cut across gaps of space and time.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Ernest Cole Family Trust for permission to reproduce the photographs in this paper and to Gunilla Knape at the Hasselblad Foundation for her help in supplying the images. Thanks to Joseph Leylyveld and Jürgen Schadeberg for taking the time to answer my questions about Ernest Cole. Grateful thanks are also due to Philip Bonner for endless discussions about apartheid, Alex Lichtenstein and the anonymous reviewers from Safundi for feedback and criticism on an earlier version of this paper. Lastly, the financial assistance of the research working group in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1 Knape, “Notes on the Life of Ernest Cole,” 18.
2 Slusher, Conversations with Photographers, 12.
3 Kracauer, "Photography," 252.
4 David Goldblatt and M. Neelika Jayawardane, public conversation about the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid, 24 June 2014, Museum Africa, Johannesburg. http://africasacountry.com/...conversation-with-davidgoldblatt-about-rise-and-fall-of-apart/ (accessed November 2015).
5 Jürgen Schadeberg and Joseph Lelyveld, personal communications, December 2015.
6 Sekula, Dismantling Modernism, 862.
7 Edwards, Martha Rosle: The Bowery, 3.
8 See Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery, 121; see also Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”, in which he refers to Cole’s publication and how he countered the omnipresent gaze of apartheid.
9 Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthoughts on Documentary,” 261.
10 Edwards: Martha Rosler: The Bowery.
11 See Stallabrass, ed., Documentary.
12 See Rosler, 3 Works, in which the entire work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems, is reproduced. The image referred to above is on page 26.
13 Ibid., 22.
14 Much more could be said of Rosler’s project, however, my objective here is to show how their sensibility overlaps.
15 Cole, House of Bondage, 82.
16 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85.
17 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 262.
18 Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, 29.
19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53.
20 Siebrits’ evocative phrase, in Gideon Mendel, 1.
21 Lugon, “‘Documentary’: Authority and Ambiguities,” 29.
22 Ibid., 29.
23 Edwards, Martha Rosler: The Bowery, 81.
24 Stallabrass, ed., Documentary, 16.
25 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 174.
26 Campany, Eugène Atget, Photographe de Paris, unpaginated.
27 Stott, Documentary Expression, 18.
28 Sekula, Dismantling Modernism, 862.
29 Enwezor, “Documentary Vérité,” 102.
30 Stott, Documentary Expression, 215.
31 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, xiv.
32 Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, 182.
33 Stott, Documentary Expression, 212.
34 Ibid., 213. Among them were Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939), Archibald Macleish’s Land of the Free (1938), Lewis Hine’s Men at Work: Photographic studies of men and machines (1932), and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let us now praise famous men (1941).
35 Stott, Documentary Expression, 226.
36 See Stott, Documentary Expression, 222. Evans said that he Agee were “furious” at You Have Seen Their Faces, feeling themselves “outsmarted by an inferior motive.”
37 Lugon, “‘Documentary’: Authority and Ambiguities,” 36.
38 Batchen and others, eds., Picturing Atrocity, 233.
39 Introduction, House of Bondage. Personal Communication with Joseph Lelyveld, November 2015.
40 Cartier-Bresson, The People of Moscow, unpaginated.
41 Ibid.
42 Cole with Thomas Flaherty, House of Bondage, 23.
43 Cartier-Bresson had never been to Moscow prior to this trip and required the services of an interpreter who organized access and took care of authorizations when they were required.
44 Robertson, “Ernest Cole in the House of Bondage," 31.
45 Enwezor and Bester, eds., Rise and Fall of Apartheid. The exhibition traveled from the International Center of Photography, New York, to South Africa, Munich and Milan, and was accompanied by a catalog with essays by Colin Richards, Michael Godby, Achille Mbembe, Darren Newbury, Patricia Hayes Andries Oliphant and Rory Bester.
46 Richards, “Retouching Apartheid,” 234.
47 Palmer, “About Turning”, unpaginated.
48 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53.
49 Manoim, “The Black Press”, 198.
50 Ibid., 207.
51 Nkosi, Home and Exile, 35.
52 Dlamini, Native Nostalgia, 15.
53 Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary, 52.
54 Peffer, “A Short History of Photography in South Africa,” 258.
55 Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid, 261.
56 Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary, 33–4.
57 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 83.
58 Jewesbury, “Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin,” 44.
59 A phrase from Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died that Night, 104.
60 Delius, Phillips and Rankin-Smith. eds., A Long Way Home, 13.
61 Ibid.,15.
62 I am grateful to Dr Paul Stewart for this information.
63 See Knape, “Notes on the Life of Ernest Cole," 175.
64 Crush, “Power and Surveillance”, 828–9.
65 Ibid., 833. See Poster, Mode of Information, 91.
66 Unpublished interview with Billy Ocean and Philip Bonner, Kliptown, 2005.
67 Knape, “Notes on the life of Ernest Cole,” 228.
68 Ibid., 27.
69 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation. See also, Sekula’s essay, “The Body and the Archive” in which he refers to Cole’s publication and how he countered the omnipresent gaze of apartheid, 377.
70 Sekula, Dismantling Modernism, 863.
71 Benjamin, Small History of Photography, 256.
72 Nkosi, Home and Exile, 40.
73 Powell, “A Slight Small Youngster,” 39.
74 Bonner, Gaule, and Mooney, “Race, Politics and the Quotidian,” 5.
75 Ibid.
76 Compare for example the practice of elaborate reconstruction in the work of contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall.
77 See, for example, the photographic projects by Wiebke Loeper Moll 31 (2005), Jens Hagen Ohio #15, Miyako Ishiuchi Mother (2006), Rinko Kawauchi Illuminance (2011), and Simryn Gill May 2006 (2006), all of whom chart biographical and prosaic aspects of daily life in their work.