‘It is an extraordinary experience to live as though life were punishment for being Black,’ says South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). An extraordinary experience that he captured the brutal daily reality of in the 1960s. His photographs, smuggled out of South Africa and published as a book decades ago, were among the first public documents of apartheid shared in the west. They tell a horrifying story of repression, aggression and cultural suppression.
Cole captures the crushed commutes of Africans on Blacks-only trains, the inhuman degradation of work in the mines, the ludicrousness of segregation signs, the exploitation of Black workers in white homes, the pain of life way below the poverty line. He documents the crowded classrooms, the dirty hospitals, the kids sleeping in streets. There’s so much pain, so much injustice.
But he also finds joy and entertainment, always in the face of adversity; a couple dancing, a kid learning an instrument, people finding solace in church.
It’s a special body of work. Not because his photos here are ‘good’ in an artistic sense, but because the story he’s telling needed to be told, and he tells it with a shocking honesty that’s devastatingly powerful.
