'House of Bondage' by Ernest Cole reissued by Aperture

Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage was originally published by Random House in the US in 1967, a year after he had fled into exile from SA with his extensive photographic documentation of the everyday evils and depredations of high apartheid.

His only full publication and magnum opus, House of Bondage has had a significant afterlife, influencing countless photojournalists for the ways in which it captured the wide social and personal horrors of the apartheid system. Compassionate yet unflinching in its portrayals of the trauma suffered by Black South Africans, Cole  alternated between social documentary and personal portraiture to present a full representation of the system’s horror. Photographs from the collection are now a  centrepiece of the permanent exhibit at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg.

He changed his name to Cole from Kole and was thus able to be reclassified as Coloured under the apartheid state’s bizarre race classification system. Using certain “privileges" that came with the designation, he was able to leave the country in 1966, aged 26, with a portfolio of work and enter the US. There he contacted the Magnum Photos agency, who assisted in getting the original edition of published through Random House in the US.

The apartheid state was well aware of the impact of Cole’s work on the international stage, including its withering original commentary (for example, Cole writes: “Three-hundred years of white supremacy in South Africa has placed us in bondage, stripped us of our dignity, robbed us of our self-esteem and surrounded us with hate.”), and retaliated by banning from the country in 1968.

This edition, published by renowned photographic publisher and journal Aperture in New York, recontextualises this pivotal book for our time. It retains Cole’s original writings and images, while adding new perspectives on his life and the legacy of House of Bondage, including a preface in the form of a lament by SA’s poet laureate Mongane Wally Serote, who also spoke at last week’s relaunch of the work at Wits Art Museum.

The latest edition includes a selection of previously unseen photographs of creative expression and cultural activity in Black communities; a useful corrective to the uniform view of oppression and subjugation that had been its focus.

Cole died of pancreatic cancer in 1990, leaving behind an intriguing and unpublished archive, including a Ford Foundation-funded commission in the US to document African-American life there. House of Bondage remains his magnum opus and continues to be an important on-the-ground documentation of apartheid oppression. Both Aperture and the Photography Legacy Project, who were involved in the republication in SA, are to be commended for bringing it back to life.