Lost Photographs of Black America

Ernest Cole was born in 1940 to a Black family in the Eersterust township, near Pretoria, South Africa.

- Vann R. Newkirk II

As a child, he witnessed the formalization of the apartheid regime. When he was a teenager, he began working for Drum, a South African magazine geared toward Black readers. He later changed the spelling of his surname from Kole to Cole, which along with straightening his hair-helped reclassify him as "Coloured," a formal designation that gave him more freedom of movement in the country's calcifying racial hierarchy. He became one of South Africa's first Black freelance photographers, earning the ire of apartheid enforcers by capturing the human costs of the regime.

But Cole wanted to have a wider reach, and in 1966, he arrived in the United States, having smuggled enough photos out of South Africa to publish a book. House of Bondage introduced many people around the world to the horrors of apartheid. Those images of malnutrition and ritual humiliation were also the last he'd take of his country. He was soon banned from South Africa, and after sojourns in Sweden, he faded into obscurity on the streets of New York City. Cole, who died in exile in 1990, never published another book.