The black South African photographer Ernest Cole was born in Pretoria and lived and worked through the casual horrors of apartheid. As a youth, using a camera given to him by a priest, he chronicled such everyday abuses as the demolition of his family neighbourhood. The bulldozers made way for a new white settlement and sent his educated, homeowning family spiralling into poverty and uncertainty.
Cole was present at the Sharpeville Massacre, where 69 protesters were killed for demonstrating against the pass laws that restricted travel for people of colour. Cole himself was able to work only because he persuaded government officials that he was mixed race, not black.
He studied the groundbreaking works of the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to fashion indelible frontline images of segregated railway platforms, overcrowded classrooms and humiliating medical examinations.
Forced into exile in 1966, Cole relocated to the United States, where he continued his work, capturing small contrasts and uneasy parallels between American segregation and apartheid.
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His pioneering South African photojournalism was collected in House of Bondage. The 1967 book, which was banned in South Africa, should have cemented his legacy at just 27. In the US, however, he struggled with loneliness, mental illness and editorial interference. He died from cancer in 1990, homeless and obscure.
Cole, it was assumed, had given up on photography. He hadn’t. Working from an affecting script credited to Cole and Raoul Peck, this film’s director, LaKeith Stanfield, its narrator, voices the chronicler: “I never stopped photographing for a single moment,” he says.
Sure enough, decades after Cole’s death, a staggering archive of more than 60,000 of his film negatives suspiciously surfaced in a Stockholm bank vault.
Peck is more interested in bringing Cole to life than solving the Swedish mystery. In common with the film-maker’s vital portraits of Karl Marx, Patrice Lumumba and James Baldwin, Lost and Found relocates its subject at the nexus of ANC truth-and-reconciliation hearings, Jim Crow laws and New York street life.
Stanfield and Peck movingly channel their late subject against the sweep of history: “The total man does not live one experience.”
In cinemas from Friday, March 7th
