Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

15

Following a recent UK exhibition of South African photographer’s Ernest Cole’s ground-breaking photobook House of Bondage – one of the most significant photographic works of the 20th century, which exposed the inhumanity and injustice of South African apartheid to the world – Raoul Peck’s new documentary takes his story to film.

Narrated by actor LaKeith Stanfield, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is filled with images of the acutely painful photographs Cole risked his own life to take; psychological portraits of existence within a brutal caste system, its misery, violence and indignity. Published in 1967 when Cole was only in his 20s, House of Bondage exiled him to Europe and America for the rest of his life, enraged for decades by the silence of the West in the face of the apartheid regime.

Of a piece with Peck’s wider body of work (including the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro) which often uses specific figures to re-orient our perspectives on society and history, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is also a kind of detective thriller, which documents a latter-day discovery while reassessing Cole’s life and the immensity of his contribution to our understanding of race.