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\u2019s 1967 classic of photojournalism, House of Bondage, which chronicled with rare diligence the atrocities committed under South Africa\u2019s 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: \u201cI knew then what I must do,\u201d he wrote in the wake of his first work experience. \u201cI would do a book of photographs to show the world what the white South African had done to the black.\u201dHouse of Bondage contained images that continue to be among the most familiar depictions of South Africa\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s later life, as well as unearthing extra material from his years in South Africa. The revival of interest prompted Cole\u2019s 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\u2019Oeil d\u2019Or prize for best documentary at last year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival. The movie is a candid and moving account of Cole\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cliberated\u201d him. \u201cIt was the perfect city. A city of asylum, highly politicised. Most of the student leaders there had been in prison.\u201d Cole\u2019s photographs, the first to depict apartheid\u2019s methods with such clarity, were being widely circulated and discussed.\u201cWe all knew those pictures \u2014 they were iconic,\u201d Peck tells me in his studio in central Paris. \u201cBut we did not know who they were by. We didn\u2019t really care. Those photographs were not about artistry, they were about fighting.\u201dIt was much later, he says, that he deepened his knowledge of Cole, after rereading the annotations of House of Bondage. \u201cIt was then I understood the power of those texts, and the way he analysed things,\u201d says Peck. \u201cI saw how precise he was, how sharp and how prescient.\u201dIn his film, Peck has used only Cole\u2019s words, layered over those powerful images, to tell his story. He says the first third of the film uses the photographer\u2019s own writings, while the rest comes from new interviews with people who knew him, which Peck has turned into a first-person narrative. \u201cWe 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,\u201d Peck says.\u201cBut 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.\u201dThe movie casts light on Cole\u2019s unhappy New York years, which Peck says are misunderstood by many western observers. \u201cThey 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.\u201dPeck says Cole\u2019s 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: \u201cExposing truth at whatever cost is one thing, but having to live a lifetime of being a chronicler of misery and injustice\u00a0and callousness is another. The total man does not live one experience.\u201d\u201cHe had much bigger ambitions than that,\u201d says Peck. \u201cHe 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.\u201d Cole\u2019s fresh immersion in the world from which he had just escaped was a shock from which he never recovered.I ask if Cole\u2019s fate was inevitable, or if he could somehow have changed the course of his career. \u201cIt was not a matter of choice,\u201d Peck says firmly. \u201cYou don\u2019t 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.\u201dThe 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\u2019s film. \u201cIt is good to have this thriller element to the story,\u201d he says. \u201cI need a lot of components to start a film \u2014 it can\u2019t just be historical or political, it has to be personal. There needs to be an organic connection.\u201cBut it was extraordinary to have a trove of so many photos,\u201d he continues. \u201cThat was a feast for me. The difficulty was in not getting lost in them.\u201dPeck\u2019s politically charged filmmaking \u2014 past successes include two films on the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, 2016\u2019s I Am Not Your Negro on James Baldwin, and 2021\u2019s HBO four-part documentary series on colonialism, Exterminate All the Brutes \u2014 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. \u201cIt is for the planet. We are living in an Orwellian world,\u201d he says.We return briefly to his formative years in Berlin and he reminisces, fondly but without sentiment: \u201cBerlin 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.\u201d\u2018Ernest Cole: Lost & Found\u2019 is in cinemas from March 7Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019s 1967 classic of photojournalism, House of Bondage, which chronicled with rare diligence the atrocities committed under South Africa\u2019s apartheid regime in the 1960s.Cole, born in a Transvaal township in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":216337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-216336","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":216338,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216336\/revisions\/216338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}