This momentous exhibition, presented with Magnum Photos, celebrates South-African photographer Ernest Cole’s (1940-1990) groundbreaking project House of Bondage. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his photographs, settling in New York. House of Bondage was published in 1967 and revealed the brutality and injustice of apartheid to the world. It became one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century.

“When I say that people can be fired or arrested or abused or whipped or banished for trifles, I am not describing the exceptional case for the sake of being inflammatory. What I say is true — and most white South Africans would acknowledge it freely. They do not pretend these things are not happening. The essential cruelty of the situation is not that all blacks are virtuous and all whites villainous, but that the whites are conditioned not to see anything wrong in the injustices they impose on their black neighbors.” – Ernest Cole, House of Bondage, 1967.

In more than 100 photographs, the exhibition covers all 15 thematic chapters into which Cole divided the House of Bondage book, and also includes works from the chapter ‘Black Ingenuity’, which was not published in the original edition. The exhibition also features early original prints, personal documents, original editions, ephemera and filmed interviews with Cole.

In 2022, House of Bondage was re-released by Aperture with an additional chapter, and for the first time, Cole’s photographs depicting Black lives in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s was published in 2024’s The True America. The show at The Photographers Gallery in London is on view until 22nd September so run to see it!

–

Image credit: Ernest Cole, South Africa, 1960s. Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, await processing and assignment. From the chapter “The Mines” © Ernest Cole / Magnum Photos.