Ernest Cole was born in Eersterust in Pretoria, South Africa.
He left school early and became an unskilled labourer. His break came when he was employed by a Chinese studio photographer as his assistant. Here he picked up the basics of photography and obtained an old reflex camera.
In 1958 Cole applied for a job with Drum magazine. Jürgen Schadeberg, the chief photographer employed him as his assistant. Cole also started a correspondence course with the New York Institute of Photography. With their support, he decided on a project which entailed recording the evils and social effects of apartheid.
He then worked at the Bantu World newspaper (later renamed The World - now The Sowetan) where he continued his career as a photographer. In the early 1960s, he started to freelance for clients such as Drum, the Rand Daily Mail, The World and the Sunday Express. This made him South Africa’s first black freelance photographer.
Seeking to leave South Africa, he became re-classified as a Coloured. As a result, he was able to leave for New York in 1966. He took his apartheid project prints with him. These he showed to Magnum Photos. This resulted in a publishing deal with the publishing rights owned by Random House. The book, House of Bondage, was banned in South Africa.
In the book, 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."
Later he received a grant from the Ford Foundation for another book, A study of the Negro family in the rural South and the Negro family in the urban ghetto. This was never published although he did take a number of photographs.
Cole then moved to Sweden where he took up film making. The apartheid photos he had taken were used extensively by the ANC in their various publications.
House of Bondage, Random House, 1967, ISBN 0-39-442935-4
Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, Darren Newbury, University of South Africa (UNISA) Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-86888-523-7 (see Chapter 4. An 'unalterable blackness': Ernest Cole's House of Bondage)
"This is the story of the first black photojournalist to challenge South Africa’s apartheid system. Risking imprisonment, Ernest Cole dedicated his life to showing the world the injustices and exploitation of segregation. But he paid a heavy price for his work and ended up dying in exile." Journeyman Pictures
Photo-journalism exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Life Under Apartheid at the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg
eye Africa (1960 to 1998) at the Castle's William Fehr Collection, Cape Town
Colour this Whites Only at the Tate Museum in London
2001 - Soweto — A South African Myth - Photographs from the 1950s (by Alf Khumalo, Ernest Cole and Jürgen Schadeberg). The core of the exhibition is the student uprising of 1976. This includes some of Peter Magubane's work.
