South Africa

_{Posted on Wednesday 22-8-2007}

Through the camera lens of Ernest Cole

_{The photographs of Ernest Cole will be on display at Iziko South  African National Gallery from 4 September until year end. Cole was an extraordinarily courageous young photographer who spent five years documenting  everyday experiences of black South Africans under Apartheid in the  1960s.}

_{Antoine Freitas, Congo, Kassaï, 1939}

_{Simply titled 'Ernest Cole', the exhibition is a commentary on many manifestations of Apartheid, as seen through Cole's lens: the lives of migrant labourers recruited to the mines and the indignities that they were forced to endure, pass raids and arrests, the plight of domestic workers, 'Bantu' education, inadequate health care and poverty. The project culminated in  the publication of House of Bondage in New York in 1967, negotiated by Magnum  Photos, after Cole fled South Africa with a suitcase of his photographic prints.  The immediate banning of the book in South Africa imposed permanent exile on the  photographer, who was then only 27. In the United States he undertook a project  funded by the Ford Foundation, but this never reached completion and Cole finally gave up taking photographs. He died in New York in 1990, shortly before  his 50th birthday and a few days after the release of Nelson Mandela.  Although the negatives for his South African images were  smuggled out by fellow photographer Struan Robertson, with whom Ernest Cole had  shared a darkroom in Johannesburg, their current whereabouts are unknown.}

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