House of Bondage: Vintage Prints from the Ernest Cole Family Trust - Part II
Magnum Gallery is delighted to present part two of a three-part exhibition between the UK, Europe and South Africa by the late Ernest Cole. In collaboration with Goodman Gallery in the UK and South Africa, and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust will present rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.
On view from January 22, 2025 - March 29, 2025
Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications House of Bondage and The True America, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l took place at the Goodman gallery in London in November last year. Part lll will be shown in Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, in February. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from House of Bondage, each exhibition will be unique.
Cole’s book House of Bondage, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where House of Bondage was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.
Ernest Cole (b, Transvaal, South Africa, 1940; d. New York, 1990) is best known for House of Bondage, a photobook published in 1967 that chronicles the horrors of apartheid. After fleeing South Africa in 1966, he became a “banned person,” settling in New York.
He was associated with Magnum Photos and received funding from the Ford Foundation to undertake a project looking at Black communities and cultures in the United States. Cole spent an extensive time in Sweden and became involved with the Tiofoto collective. He died at age forty-nine of cancer. In 2017, more than sixty thousand of his negatives—missing for more than forty years—resurfaced in Sweden.
In 2022, House of Bondage was reissued by Aperture with The True America, and never before seen images of the United States of America, published in 2023.
Image credit © Penny Weaver