Hyde Park Pick: Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Ernest Cole was a South African photographer who was one of the first to expose the horrors of apartheid to a world audience. Apartheid ended officially 31 years ago, but in 1967 when Ernest Cole released his book ‘House of Bondage’, showing images directly of the division and violence of apartheid was rare, especially from a black perspective and lens. Cole's work led him to exile from South Africa and he lived in New York and Europe for the rest of his life, never to have overcome the loss of his home county. 

The film came about because Raoul Peck related deeply to Cole’s exile and experiences. Raoul Peck was born in 1953 in Haiti, and he mostly lived in exile in DRC and Brooklyn and France after he and his family had to flee the Duvalier dictatorship. His catalogue of past work of social issue films demonstrates how much of a meaningful and political filmmaker Peck is, including: I Am Not Your Negro on James Baldwin from 2016; The Young Karl Marx (2017); Exterminate All The Brutes (2021), which is an amazing series on the treatment of black people during colonization; and two films on Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is no different in his elevation of stories that have long been hidden.  

Peck became aware of Ernest Cole from the age of 17, when he was living in Berlin and working with the ANC. Peck was also a photographer then, and he was inspired by Cole's radical work. Peck then assisted with the preservation of Cole's photos after they were repatriated, but within this film, Peck didn't want to focus on the theft of Cole’s works, instead, he wanted to give Ernest Cole a chance to speak to him for himself, to tell his own story. 

Cole was often pigeonholed or categorised into being a ‘Black Photographer’ to take photos of misery and trauma, but he was just a photographer. He cared about people. Cole was traumatised by his exile, and further exiled and othered in the photography community. Peck understood and recognised his feeling, and he wanted to tell Cole’s story beyond his being depressed and not belonging, Cole was labeled as an unwell man, but Peck wanted his film to show why he was going through these feelings, that these feelings were justified and almost inevitable. 

Peck cast LaKieth Stanfield as Ernest Cole as he wanted an actor who could embody Cole, not just a narrator or a voiceover. LaKieth Lee Stanfield was certainly up to the task, he is an award-winning American actor who has received recognition for his roles in the films Get Out (2017), Sorry to Bother You (2018), Uncut Gems (2019), Knives Out (2019), and Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. On television, he starred in the musical series Atlanta (2016–2022), for which he won a Black Reel Award for Television. Coincidentally, Stanfield is also a recent photographer, which Peck felt gave extra authenticity to the role. 

Even though this film purposely doesn't give us too much information about the theft of Ernest Cole's work and its eventual and mysterious emergence from a Swedish bank, it's a fascinating part of the story that is difficult to ignore. The theft, return and repatriation of Cole's work follows similar themes to other films that we've been presenting recently, such as Dahomey (2024) by Mati Diop, in which 26 Benin treasures were repatriated from a Paris Museum back to Benin. These incredible filmmakers like Peck and Diop use activist filmmaking as a method to enlighten and educate us about past traumas and inequalities. And in their creation of these new pieces of work, they right past wrongs and bring hidden narratives to light.

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is showing daily at HPPH from Fri 07 Mar. You can book tickets here.