Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Few pictures have had the social and political impact of those collected in Ernest Cole’s 1967 classic of photojournalism, House of Bondage, which chronicled with rare diligence the atrocities committed under South Africa’s apartheid regime in the 1960s.Cole, born in a Transvaal township in 1940, discovered his vocation when working as a darkroom assistant after leaving school. His ambition at the same time was simple and overwhelming: “I knew then what I must do,” he wrote in the wake of his first work experience. “I would do a book of photographs to show the world what the white South African had done to the black.”House of Bondage contained images that continue to be among the most familiar depictions of South Africa’s ignoble past: the row of young Black miners, naked, with hands held high in the air, waiting to be medically examined before being taken to work; the small schoolboy crouching painfully on the ground, pencil in hand, rapt in concentration, trying to ignore the rivulets of sweat on his temples as he follows his lesson.Cole’s technique for taking photographs was, by necessity, furtive and swift. He became used to clicking the shutter with the camera by his side, moving quickly to avoid suspicion. He established himself as one of the country’s first Black freelance photographers, selling his work to progressive domestic publications and to the Associated Press.By the time House of Bondage was published, however, Cole had been forced to leave South Africa and had moved to New York, where he started to work for the Magnum agency. He made several trips to Europe before returning to the US, where he struggled to continue with his career. He died, aged 49, in 1990, unrecognised and destitute.The Ernest Cole story went largely untold in the succeeding decades until the discovery of a cache of 60,000 lost negatives in safe-deposit boxes in a Swedish bank. These shed light on the details of Cole’s later life, as well as unearthing extra material from his years in South Africa. The revival of interest prompted Cole’s estate to get in touch with the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, asking whether he would consider making a documentary on the photographer.The result is Ernest Cole: Lost & Found, a film two years in the making, which the 71-year-old director hopes will spark the interest of a new generation. The film won the L’Oeil d’Or prize for best documentary at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The movie is a candid and moving account of Cole’s life and work, but also a broader examination of the pain of exile, a subject with which Peck himself is all too familiar.He was in his teens when he first encountered Cole’s photographs, having moved to Berlin at the beginning of the 1970s to complete his education. His life up to that point had already been nomadic and turbulent, fleeing his homeland’s dictatorship with his family to settle in freshly independent Congo when he was eight, and later going to France, via a brief spell in New York, to finish high school.But it was Berlin, he says today, that “liberated” him. “It was the perfect city. A city of asylum, highly politicised. Most of the student leaders there had been in prison.” Cole’s photographs, the first to depict apartheid’s methods with such clarity, were being widely circulated and discussed.“We all knew those pictures — they were iconic,” Peck tells me in his studio in central Paris. “But we did not know who they were by. We didn’t really care. Those photographs were not about artistry, they were about fighting.”It was much later, he says, that he deepened his knowledge of Cole, after rereading the annotations of House of Bondage. “It was then I understood the power of those texts, and the way he analysed things,” says Peck. “I saw how precise he was, how sharp and how prescient.”In his film, Peck has used only Cole’s words, layered over those powerful images, to tell his story. He says the first third of the film uses the photographer’s own writings, while the rest comes from new interviews with people who knew him, which Peck has turned into a first-person narrative. “We talked to about 80 people: there was a neighbour who he had tea with every afternoon, and we found a woman who talked to him on the phone every day when he was in hospital, when he talked about his darkest thoughts, his thoughts about suicide,” Peck says.“But the words [in the film], they are his words; they are not invented. The aim of the film was to let Ernest Cole gain power over his own story.”The movie casts light on Cole’s unhappy New York years, which Peck says are misunderstood by many western observers. “They say he underwent some kind of pathological change or [suffered from] depression, or became crazy, without explaining anything. But I know what it is to be isolated, to be in exile, I know what it is to be seen only through the colour of your skin.”Peck says Cole’s professional life was stymied by being stereotyped, constantly commissioned to take photographs of the racial struggles in the US. He quotes from a letter Cole wrote in 1968, just a couple of years after his arrival: “Exposing truth at whatever cost is one thing, but having to live a lifetime of being a chronicler of misery and injustice and callousness is another. The total man does not live one experience.”“He had much bigger ambitions than that,” says Peck. “He never saw himself as this little [Cole was around 5ft tall] Black photographer. No! His model was [Henri] Cartier-Bresson! Who, by the way, travelled around the whole world, photographing everyone.” Cole’s fresh immersion in the world from which he had just escaped was a shock from which he never recovered.I ask if Cole’s fate was inevitable, or if he could somehow have changed the course of his career. “It was not a matter of choice,” Peck says firmly. “You don’t have a catalogue to choose your life. Life is not like that. You follow your current fight. He followed a path which took him to New York. He had no clue that he would find all those closed doors.”The cache of photographs found in Sweden in 2017, and offered to the Cole family trust by the Hasselblad Foundation and the Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, where, it is claimed, they had been stored in a safe-deposit box since 1972 (precise details of how they ended up there remain opaque) offered another twist for Peck’s film. “It is good to have this thriller element to the story,” he says. “I need a lot of components to start a film — it can’t just be historical or political, it has to be personal. There needs to be an organic connection.“But it was extraordinary to have a trove of so many photos,” he continues. “That was a feast for me. The difficulty was in not getting lost in them.”Peck’s politically charged filmmaking — past successes include two films on the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, 2016’s I Am Not Your Negro on James Baldwin, and 2021’s HBO four-part documentary series on colonialism, Exterminate All the Brutes — itself takes a perhaps unexpected turn with his next project, on George Orwell.He declines to tell me anything about it, but when I suggest it will surely be of great interest to British viewers, he corrects me. “It is for the planet. We are living in an Orwellian world,” he says.We return briefly to his formative years in Berlin and he reminisces, fondly but without sentiment: “Berlin was more open to me, more open to culture. At that stage, you are looking for places where there is no limit. I was never hypnotised by the so-called free world. Those were propaganda words to me.”‘Ernest Cole: Lost & Found’ is in cinemas from March 7Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
