Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024)
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Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a 2024 documentary chronicling the life and work of Ernest Cole—one of the first Black freelance photographers in South Africa. Cole’s early pictures were shocking at the time of their first publication, revealing to the world Black life under apartheid. He fled South Africa in 1966 and lived in exile in the United States, where he photographed extensively in New York City as well as the American South, fascinated by the ways this country could be at times vastly different from, and at other times eerily similar to, the segregated culture of his homeland. During this period, he published his landmark book of photographs denouncing apartheid, House of Bondage, which, while banned in South Africa, cemented Cole’s place as one of the great photographers of his time, at the age of 27. After his death, more than 60,000 of his 35-millimeter film negatives, formerly thought to have been lost, were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm. Telling his own story through his writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation. Generously sponsored by Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979.
Offered in conjunction with the exhibition David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive. Exhibition co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.