Ernest Cole: Lost and Found

Ernest Cole was the first Black South African photographer to expose the crimes of the apartheid regime in full public view. Forced into exile, he leaves for New York at the age of 27, smuggling his negatives with him, from which he produces the photo book House of Bondage (1967), still considered one of the most important photo books of the 20th century. ‘How to survive in the West’ is the question the photographer asks himself as his life, made up of wanderings between the United States and Europe, plunges him into near-total destitution. He dies in 1990, just a few days after Nelson Mandela's release, and gradually falls into oblivion until the mysterious discovery in 2017 of 60,000 negatives kept in the safe of a Swedish bank. In his new documentary, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, who is no stranger to questions of reparation, finally rehabilitates the memory of this largely unknown figure of photojournalism. Through gripping archive footage and a personal, embodied narrative, Raoul Peck creates an eminently political story that confronts the Western world with its responsibility for the racial segregation imposed on Black populations, in South Africa and elsewhere.