240 pages Edited by Raoul Peck Text(s) by Raoul Peck Photograph(s) by Ernest Cole 30 x 22 cm Language: French Paperback Publisher: Denoël & Velvet Film 2024
Ernest Cole, a South African photographer, was the first to reveal to the world the horrors of apartheid. Having fled South Africa in 1966, he published House of Bondage in New York at just twenty-seven years old. His book, a testimony to apartheid, was banned in his home country. Stateless, Ernest Cole lived a solitary life in New York. He photographed his contemporaries and observed the city, but never truly found his place there. He died in 1990, abandoned by all, without ever seeing his homeland again.
In 2017, more than 60,000 of his negatives and photographs—most of them previously unseen—were mysteriously “discovered” in the vaults of a Swedish bank.
Through these extraordinary images from Africa and America, Raoul Peck recounts Cole’s wanderings, his struggles as an artist, and his anger at the silence—or complicity—of the Western world in the face of the horrors of apartheid and racial segregation in the United States.
