Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Over almost a decade, Ernest Cole photographed the pitiless reality of Black life in his home country at the height of apartheid. Forced to move to America to publish his provocative 1967 book, House of Bondage, he never returned to South Africa. On assignment as a photojournalist to the Deep South, Cole came to realise that America wasn’t all that different from his homeland when it came to racial inequality. Isolated, stateless and downtrodden, he struggled to find his place in the world, eventually abandoning his camera. Recently, thousands of Cole’s previously lost negatives – including mesmerising images from the streets of New York – were mysteriously found in a Swedish bank vault. Peck elegantly overlays these evocative images with Cole’s heartbreaking story, often using the exiled artist’s own poetic words, with a melancholic jazz-fuelled score and narration from Academy Award-nominated actor LaKeith Stanfield.