‘The True America’ captures minority lives on US streets during troubled times

It’s been a busy year for the long road to an equitable legacy of photographer Ernest Cole.

In February, after the re-release last year of his seminal 1967 book House of Bondage, Aperture published a new book of Cole’s previously unseen — and for decades believed to be lost — work from the early years of his exile in the US: The True America.

In May, Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) premiered his documentary about Cole, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found at the Cannes Film Festival, which garnered the festival’s Golden Eye Prize for best documentary.

A few weeks before the documentary’s successful Cannes premiere, it was quietly announced by the Hasselblad Foundation in Sweden that 496 vintage prints held in its collection since the 1990s were to be returned to the Ernest Cole Family Trust, after what the foundation described as a period in which it had been “taking curatorial care” of the material. No mention was made in Hasselblad’s press release of the fact that the family of Cole — who died in ill-health and poverty in New York in February 1990, just eight days after watching the release of Nelson Mandela on a television from his hospital bed — had been engaged in a lengthy, expensive legal battle to have the material held in the foundation’s headquarters in Gothenburg returned to his rightful heirs for years.

The prints, worth an estimated $5m (about R93m) may represent the single biggest value return of artwork to Africa from the northern hemisphere in history and the battle to bring them home and the reasons for the Hasselblad Foundation’s change of heart are elements of a story worthy of a book on its own.

Last month, a new exhibition of a selection of some of the photos from 40,000 negatives of Cole’s US work — returned mysteriously in 2017 to his nephew, Leslie Matlaisane, from a Swedish bank vault where they’d been sitting for decades — opened at the Autograph Gallery in London. This was preceded by a showing of photographs from House of Bondage that ran for the first six months of the year at the Foam Gallery in Amsterdam.

The great tragedy of all of this long overdue but thoroughly deserved celebration of Cole’s work is, of course, that most of it didn’t happen in his lifetime. What the selection of photographs presented in The True America, the Autograph Gallery’s Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile exhibition, and by all accounts (as it remains yet unseen in South Africa) Peck’s documentary, is that Cole’s work beyond House of Bondage should have been published, widely seen and acclaimed for its depiction of the multifaceted complexities of black life in the US during the politically charged era of the late 1960s in the same way the work of contemporaries such as Gordon Parks has.

The work Cole produced in the US was made predominantly for two projects for which he received a grant from the Ford Foundation for assistance, and which were burdened with the decidedly unsexy academic titles A Study of the Negro Family in the Rural South and A Study of the Negro Family in the Urban Ghetto. Now that these photographs are slowly being released to the world, they reveal Cole to have been, in those early years of his exile, a photographer and a young person of colour who, as the Art Institute of Chicago’s Leslie M Wilson writes in her essay in The True America, was “searching for a place not to merely live but to thrive”.

The experiences that had shaped him in apartheid South Africa had also already made him, in his late twenties, a photographer who “quickly recognised what America could not give him, and what it struggled to give other black people, not only in terms of opportunity, but in a fundamental sense of home and care and safety”.

In spite of the conditions that existed in broader, racially charged and not fully integrated America, the subjects of Cole’s ever-curious lens — many of them living in the vibrant, proud community of Harlem — demonstrate, as Wilson notes, “what black Americans made, what they held on to in the face of those conditions ... [and] they show the communities where Cole was trying to find new people and places and things to hold on to”.

We may have little of his own words and thoughts to know with any certainty what Cole felt about the charged atmosphere in which he found himself in New York in 1968. It was one of the most simultaneously turbulent and hopeful years of 20th century history — the year of the clashes between anti-Vietnam protesters and police on the streets of Chicago, the assassinations of Martin Luther King jnr and Bobby Kennedy, and further afield the student protests of Paris and the failed attempts of young Czechoslovakians to wrest themselves free of the tyranny of Soviet rule. But from the images left to gather dust for so many years in that Swedish bank vault, we can finally begin to see that pivotal moment in the world as Cole saw it — in all its messy, hopeful, contradictory and often colourful glory, tension, heartbreak and aspiration.

From the streets of Harlem and Midtown Manhattan to the churches of Atlanta; the ragged rural homesteads of black workers in Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina; the fiery fear and boiling tensions on the streets of Washington in the wake of King’s assassination; the righteous black power movements of Oakland, California, and Cleveland, Ohio; the hopes of feminist and early LBGT activists; and the quietly powerful intimate expressions of love between people of different races — all are on display in Cole’s “new” work.

The images document a particular place and time, while more than succeeding on their own terms as evidence of his unique talents as a keen observer with a deep empathy for humanity in all its grubby, often ironic and always energetic chaos. As one typically irony-filled image of a pair of signs in Harlem reminds us, “life can be beautiful and well worth living”, even alongside a shopfront for a “universal exterminator”.

The job of making sense of why Cole’s projects — clearly conducted with enthusiasm and dedication in the first few years of his exile — somehow ran out of steam and faltered, before disappearing without trace for more than half a century, remains to be unpacked in the years ahead and will, no doubt, be greatly aided by the emergence of more, powerful, previously unseen work as it’s returned from the vaults of institutions to the hands of the family trust, to find its way onto the pages of future books and the walls of museums.

These first steps in that direction, frustratingly difficult as they’ve often been to achieve, begin that process and lay a strong foundation for the re-evaluation of Cole as more than just an astute chronicler of the terrible realities and injustices of apartheid represented in House of Bondage, which collection made him a recognisable name. 

As Cole himself wrote in a 1968 letter, discovered in the trove found in Sweden and included in Peck’s introduction to The True America: “When I left home, I thought I would focus my talents on other aspects of life, which I assumed would be more hopeful and some joy to do. However, what I have seen in this country more than the past two years has proved me wrong. Recording the truth at whatever cost is one thing, but finding one[self] having to live a lifetime of being the chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another.”

It turns out, he was already becoming more than the chronicler of misery he feared he’d always be, even if he couldn’t see it at the time. The true America that Cole saw remains, even in the light of the tragic systematic failures of US society in the decades since he was travelling its streets with his unobtrusive camera. It’s a place that’s more than the hopeless misery Cole’s letter seems to indicate he felt all around him — it’s also a place where, in small, often bittersweetly remembered enclaves, people championed new ways of saying, expressing themselves and defiantly building their own communities.

Thankfully, we can be transported back to these times and places through the eyes of Cole, who as Peck celebrates, “knew the struggle it took to leave us these masterpieces, [which] will now become a magnum opus in the history of photography”, even as “[i]t will take generations to decipher and grasp your legacy”.

The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole is published by Aperture. Ernest Cole: A Lens in Exile is showing at Autograph, London, until October 12.

This feature was originally published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.