Ernest Cole at Iziko South African National Gallery
by Lauren Reid
Ernest Cole left South Africa in 1966, his departure signalling the last time the politically committed photographer would ever be in his homeland. Cole lived the remainder of his life between Europe and the US, in exile from the apartheid regime. His watershed book, House of Bondage, was published internationally in 1967, and revealed for the first time in pictorial form what the reality of black existence was in South Africa. He eventually died in New York in 1990, just a few days after Nelson Mandela was released from his 27 year-long prison term: a cruel twist of fate.
The current exhibition of Cole's work at Iziko South African National Gallery (SANG) uses House of Bondage as an entry point into re-writing this artist into South African art history. Historic circumstance finds its way into the show, with only 17 framed prints from the series acting to re-present Cole here as 'Chronicler of the House of Bondage'. The small number of images is due to Cole's sudden departure in 1966, where under intense political pressure he hastily left the country and ended up leaving behind his negatives, taking with him only positives and prints. Sadly, the negatives have been lost over time, having a strong bearing on which prints we are shown in this current exhibition. Accordingly, the impetus of the exhibition shifts onto the general legacy of Cole and the importance of his work, as opposed to any specific content within the frame, given that the pool of existing images is so small. Yet this move also firmly positions him in the canon of great South African photographers.
The modestly-sized showing uses selected text excerpts from House of Bondage to accompany the framed photographs, serving to contextualise the images and giving Cole an important posthumous voice in the gallery space. Cole's faithfulness to black-and-white clearly locates him within the Drum school of photojournalism from which he emerged. Aiming to produce 'a comprehensive photographic document of the black experience in apartheid South Africa', his images tend to portray types of people, rather than specifics. By showing workers in the mines, township life, scenes from the hospitals etc, the people within the frame come to embody the general experience of black South Africa at this time, unknowingly surrendering their individuality for Cole's purpose of exposing the hardship of daily life under this racist government.
In the book, 15 of these categories of daily life were outlined, ranging from 'The Mines' and 'Shebeens and Bantu Beer' to 'Police and Passes', and some of the themes have been reused in this show. 'Hospital Care' includes an image of a woman in Baragwanath Hospital, in obvious pain, awaiting treatment. She comes to personify the second class citizen status of the black population, her plight of pain and neglect emblematic of so many similar experiences. It is this 'smash 'n grab' style that cements Cole's legacy as a social bandit of the lens, who truly believed that his images could galvanise change if the atrocity of apartheid was exposed. When he left his homeland, he was dismayed to discover that South Africa was only one of the countries about which the world had cause for concern.
The move to frame Cole's work in a Fine Art structure by positioning it in the National Gallery, when Cole was clearly working in conventions outside of this framework, emerges as a conceptual and curatorial grey area in this exhibition. He was openly engaging in social documentary concerns, which are far removed from the Fine Art context into which his oeuvre has been placed. Although his photographs can be admired for their compositional brilliance and compelling visual nature, it was ultimately their subject with which Cole was primarily concerned. This reading of his output is supported by the successful use of the series in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, where the images have been employed as an educational visual lens into the period, specifically demonstrating the primary intention of Cole's work as being didactic .
This exposes a serious flaw in the SANG's agenda, where photography that is executed in a non-art vein is left awkwardly straddling gallery and museum territory, as opposed to an exclusive genre-specific site. Given the rich photographic history of the struggle movement, it is certainly worth questioning whether such a space is necessary.
Considering the logistical constraints of having so few images and no negatives, the curatorial strategy of the exhibition cleverly posits itself as engaging with Ernest Cole the political activist and photographer, rather than locating him as just an artist. And as a result, the viewer is given a host of trivia building up the character of Cole - such as his name change from Kole to Cole, which allowed him to be reclassified as coloured and into new spaces to photograph, where his 'dompas' might have otherwise prohibited him from entering. This approach ensures that one does leave the space educated with a rich background story as much as an appreciation of the photos, but it is also leaves one wondering whether this is indeed a retrospective exhibition, if Ernest Cole ceases to exist outside of this body of work from the 1960s.
The Jürgen Schadeberg-produced documentary on Cole, which is discreetly playing in a corner of the room, gives a passing glance at his work from the 1980s, which was shot on the streets of New York. But reference to this is omitted in an exhibition that seems to pay very little heed to Cole's life after 1966 in South Africa. Compared with the extensive Santu Mofokeng exhibition held at the same gallery in 2007 (which sprawled over three main rooms to Cole's hidden one), one is left confused as to whether this show is really about Cole, or is merely a slice of his existence that suits the historical narrative that Iziko searches for, of the 'exiled South African'?
So while one can offer a degree of sympathy in that there are just no more images from his South African period to be displayed, the full scope of who Ernest Cole was in the entirety of his professional life appears to be missing in this space, leaving the viewer feeling somewhat cheated by what has been proposed, as this is really only a glimpse into the world of the man they refer to as 'Chronicler of the House of Bondage'.
Opens: January 2008
Closes: March 2008
Iziko South African National Gallery
Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 467 4660
Email:cquerido@iziko.org.za
www.museums.org.za/iziko
Hours: Tue - Sun 10am - 5pm
