South African photographer Ernest Cole died penniless and almost-forgotten in New York City, in February 1990. Days earlier, Nelson Mandela, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-Apartheid leader, had walked triumphantly out of a South African prison. It was a bittersweet coincidence. House of Bondage (1967), the only volume of Cole’s work to appear during his lifetime, was the first book-length visual exposé of Apartheid South Africa’s brutal system of racial domination. Published in New York and sold throughout the world, its images of Black South Africans’ everyday suffering played an important role in making Apartheid a global issue. As Leslie M. Wilson writes in Ernest Cole: The True America (2024), a newly published book of Cole’s later photographs of the United States, House of Bondage was “a watershed in representing — in depth, rage, and poignant clarity … aspects of Black life under apartheid.” The book was a towering achievement, artistically and politically, and secured Cole’s place as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century.
It is no surprise that The True America (the title comes from graffiti on a wall in one of Cole’s photographs from Harlem) comes overburdened with expectations. That is only partly because of the iconic status of House of Bondage. It is also due to the lingering excitement over the rediscovery of Cole’s American photographs, which had disappeared before his death. There was a good deal of hype about them when the Swedish bank that had secretly and illegally been holding them transferred them to the Cole Family Trust in 2017. Anyone familiar with House of Bondage could be forgiven for anticipating that these photographs would be revelatory, offering new ways of seeing the United States, literally and figuratively, during the fraught years of 1967 to 1972.
I shared this anticipation, and it is why I agreed to review The True America. The book was sure to be a triumph, I thought, and a joy to write about. Instead, the book and its three insightful essays document a tragedy: the heartbreakingly rapid decline of a great young photographer. Half a decade after the publication of House of Bondage, Cole fell into artistic stagnation, psychological distress, poverty, and occasional homelessness. The causes of his descent are multiple and often murky. As the late South African journalist and critic Ivor Powell put it, “You could, without losing the thread or doing violence to the story,” speak of Cole’s life “as a spy thriller in the genre of Cold War noir: The Photographer Who Came in from the Cold.”
The True America is about Cole’s photography. But it is also about lies, deceit, and betrayal involving the United States government, the political groups on which it spied, and Swedish institutions with predatory interests of their own. This makes it a difficult book to review. I cannot talk about the images without mentioning the intrigue.
Cole’s story begins conventionally enough, for a South African tale. He was born in 1940 and raised in an all-Black “township” near the capital, Pretoria. He dropped out of high school, refusing to subject himself to the third-rate “Bantu education” that the Apartheid government had introduced. He had been attracted to photography from an early age, and soon found a job working in the darkroom of Drum magazine, the now-legendary Johannesburg publication that catered to the urbanizing Black population. Modeled loosely on America’s Life magazine, it blended stories about sports, entertainers, and popular music with investigative journalism and serious fiction. Photography was central to the mix.
As Cole developed and printed the work of Drum’s photographers, he studied their gritty, evocative black and white images. Much of what he saw was superb. Several Drum photographers, such as Peter Magubane, went on to achieve international fame. In the early 1960s, Cole left the magazine to work as a freelance photojournalist, a step that eventually led him to Joseph Lelyveld, then the New York Times’s South African correspondent. Lelyveld began to hire him for assignments, and came to appreciate his “obsession,” as the journalist put it in the introduction to House of Bondage, with documenting the daily cruelties of Apartheid.
By the time Cole met Lelyveld, the documentary photographs that would make up House of Bondage had raised the suspicions of the South African Security Police, who placed him under surveillance. Fear of being jailed sparked his determination to get his photographs and himself out of the country. He turned to American friends — Lelyveld and diplomats at the United States embassy — for help. Both agreed. The diplomats, some of whom were almost surely intelligence officers, smuggled the bulk of Cole’s prints and negatives out of South Africa and eventually to New York City, where Cole, who had left the country separately, was reunited with them.
Cole had no friends in New York City, but he did have money — quite a bit of it. It came from the Ford Foundation, via the Institute of International Education (IIE), which awarded him funding to pursue a project on the state of the African American family in the rural South and urban North. Cole’s proposal was a catalog of the presumptions of the worst social science of the era: “The unemployed and the unemployable. Cycle of family instability — desertion. Mothers and welfare. Life of the street cornermen. Ghetto school and the youth. Rebellious youth. Religion — storefront church. Drug addiction and alcoholism in the urban areas.” The Foundation funded the project lavishly, enough to facilitate “a peripatetic — almost jet-set — lifestyle.”
The photographs in The True America, few of which fit the proposal’s categories, suggest that he never took the project seriously. The social science behind it was bad, and as Cole himself admitted, he “[did] not know enough about the situation in this country” to embark on a project of that sort. It is important to note that this assessment of his photography can only be tentative. Although the book contains 275 photographs, they represent a tiny fraction of the more than 40,000 that the Cole family recovered from the Swedish bank. There is nothing in the book to indicate whether or not the published selection is representative of the whole.
Overwhelmingly, the photographs in The True America — all untitled and dated from the late ’60s to early ’70s — are street photography in the mode that Cole’s near contemporaries, such as Roy DeCarava, Helen Levitt, and the photographers of the Kamoinge collective, made familiar. None show us a new way of seeing America, and few approach the story-telling strength and visual vitality of those in House of Bondage.
But that is an unfair standard. Cole spent six years making the photographs in his earlier book, in a society with which he was intimately familiar. To expose Apartheid was to expose the source of his own oppression. It is no wonder that it became his “obsession.” Exile in the United States left him, as Wilson writes, “profoundly unmoored.” He had lost his muse.
Nevertheless, the photographs in The True America are the work of a highly skilled photographer with a strong eye for composition and context. Many are visual delights. A black and white photograph of a young Black woman with an Angel Davis afro shows her posing for a portrait on a Harlem sidewalk. She stands in front of a starburst backdrop, holding a toy submachine gun. The narrow horizontal stripes on her shirt contrast with those of the starburst. A sign on the left side of the frame tells us that the photographer making her portrait can put her “Photo on a Button” in only one minute. Cole’s artistry and suggestion of the radical Black Power politics of the era combine to create a remarkable image. In another black and white photograph, a different young Black woman, her hair wrapped in what seems to be an American flag, poses for Cole wearing a button with her portrait printed on it. On the button, she holds the one-minute photographer’s toy submachine gun.
Cole had the ability to make light the true subject of his photograph, even when the content was compelling. One of his black and white images shows a stylishly dressed Black woman standing, in profile, on a street corner. Late afternoon sunlight coming from behind her seems to glow on the page, enveloping her and emphasizing her heavily pregnant form.
Cole’s fascination with attractive young women will remind many readers of photographer Garry Winogrand’s unsuccessful yet widely published series, Women are Beautiful (1975). Cole was probably aware of Winogrand’s work; he was one of the best-known American photographers of the 1960s and 1970s. A photograph of five White men sitting on a park bench strikes me as a sly nod to Winogrand’s well-known “Ladies on a Bench” (1964), even though none of the principal figures in it appear to be women. Instead, the men, all of different ages, occupy a bench in a Midtown Manhattan park on a warm, sunny day. A young man seems to be listening to a much older man and writing his words in a notebook. They are the only two who show any sign of being aware of each other’s existence. The others are alone in a crowd, smoking, sleeping, and apparently feeding pigeons. The scene around them is densely populated with people and commercial signage. The photograph makes the mundane memorable; it is the kind of image that both Cole and Winogrand excelled at creating.
The few color photographs in The True America are stylistically similar to his black and white images. Many, however, demonstrate Cole’s ability to use color as a powerful compositional device. The yellow, red, tan, and blue that he finds in an urban street scene make it as much abstract as it is a portrait of a young Black woman and her dog. Cole also used color film’s relative insensitivity to light to produce chiaroscuro effects. Shadows in several images are almost black, so that the subjects of street portraits seem to leap out of dark backgrounds.
Cole also had a knack for making pictures at the scene of notable events in the history of the Black freedom struggle. He was in Memphis for the strike of Black sanitation workers that led indirectly to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was visiting the city to support the strikers when he was murdered. He photographed King’s funeral. He photographed the aftermath of the uprising in Washington DC that followed King’s assassination. He photographed Black nationalists and Black Panther Party members in California. A few of these photographs are strong, such as a portrait of a resolute Memphis striker and two companions. None, however, will replace already-iconic images of the freedom struggle, such as Ernest Withers’ “I Am a Man” from the Memphis strike, and Moneta Sleet’s “Coretta Scott King and Daughter Bernice at the Funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” (both 1968).
Cole’s photographs of the freedom struggle raise questions. There is, of course, an innocent explanation for his interest in these people and events. It is no surprise that a Black photographer who was exiled from Apartheid would be interested in how African Americans were fighting the racism that confronted them. Yet there are darker, but not necessarily contradictory, possibilities. Here we must return to spycraft.
In his catalog essay, journalist and historian James Sanders suggests that at least one of the diplomats who smuggled Cole’s negatives and prints out of South Africa was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As mentioned above, Cole’s initial funding, which got him on his feet and financed his travels throughout the United States, came from the Ford Foundation, via the IIE. As Sanders points out, investigative journalists and congressional committees later established that the IIE was “one of many conduit organizations” that the CIA used to move money around. At the time that Cole arrived in the United States, the CIA was “conducting a massive spying campaign against the antiwar movement, civil rights organizations, and other dissenters.” It is possible that it had befriended him, hoping someday to put him to work on its behalf. It is also possible that he traveled to Sweden at its behest. Stockholm was home to many exiled American draft resisters, military deserters, and other dissenters. The journalist Seymour Hersh, indeed, called the city “‘the Casablanca of the Cold War,’ a city bulging with spies, intrigue, and betrayal.” It was there that Cole lost control of his photographic archive. Almost all of those that he made in Sweden have yet to be found.
For a few years, from about 1969 to 1971, Cole moved back and forth between the United States and Sweden, and he likely left the latter permanently in 1971. Within a few years, he had given up photography and sold his cameras. In 1977, he remarked to Joseph Lelyveld’s brother that it was “a lie to put things in a frame — and therefore all photographs are lies.”
Not much is known about the final years of Cole’s life, except that he was poor, often homeless, and no longer made photographs. In a series of unanswerable questions, Sanders speculates about what accounted for Cole’s tragic decline: “Did Ernest Cole discover that he had been used rather than assisted by American intelligence or was he simply repulsed by the undignified scramble for professional survival that dominated documentary photography at the dawn of the 1970s?” he writes. “Or had his belief in the camera and photography as revolutionary tools atrophied in exile?”
The deepest truth may be simpler. Cole’s old friend, Joseph Lelyveld, closed his introduction to House of Bondage with words that, in retrospect, are hauntingly prescient: “No story could ever mean as much to him as the story he left behind in South Africa,” he wrote. “Exile meant the surrender of his creative obsession … Now he was thrown on his own and forced to improvise. He was free and that was something, but he was also stranded.”
Ernest Cole: The True America (2024), written by James Sanders, Leslie M. Wilson, and Raoul Peck and published by Aperture, is available for purchase online and in bookstores.
