Ernest Cole: Lost and Found: Raoul Peck’s political tribute to a pioneering South African photographer
As in his James Baldwin doc I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Raoul Peck makes powerful use of Ernest Cole’s own words to tell his story, but the editorial flourishes used to showcase his apartheid-era photographs at times diminish their impact.
The South African photographer Ernest Cole documented apartheid with a radical directness; but in even the most candid pictures of the photographer himself there is a feeling of reserve – of some critical fact being withheld. Furtive and austere, or half obscured by the subjects he hoped to catch, such photos of Cole register his tactful mode of observation, and finally the toll of a life spent laying bare political ills.
In this Cannes award-winning documentary, the director Raoul Peck chronicles Cole’s life and work through his photographs and writings – much as he dramatised James Baldwin’s manuscripts in I Am Not Your Negro (2016) – using an archive of 60,000 of Cole’s long-lost negatives that mysteriously resurfaced in a Swiss bank in 2017. Peck looks hard into the depths of affliction that both animated and frustrated Cole’s photography, but he does so with a slickness and efficiency that feel estranged from Cole’s annals of pain.
Cole was South Africa’s first Black freelance photographer. After seeing Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book of photographs of daily life in Soviet Moscow in 1954, he sought to produce an equivalent for his own country. But while Cartier-Bresson called himself a ‘thief ’, a man on the run, for Cole such photographic heists were fraught with political urgency: “It’s a matter of survival – to steal every moment.” His book House of Bondage (1967) is a searing collection of routine humiliations and indignities. A white man casually slaps a Black child on the street, his other hand kept coolly in his trouser pocket; Black miners await the scarce medical attention on offer, stark naked and held in a line-up.
In Cole’s photographs, even the most mundane activities take on the visual logic of punishment. The film rapidly cycles through images of overcrowded classrooms and jam-packed trains, domestic servitude and exploited labour – images of such force that House of Bondage was banned in South Africa and Cole was stripped of his citizenship. But it is in Cole’s attention to the slow violence of bureaucracy – in his eye for uniforms, queues, segregation signs and pocketbooks – that the ruthless disempowerment enforced by apartheid is made most startling.
Peck follows Cole to New York, where his street photography included charismatic colour portraits of the city’s fashionable youth, and then on to the deprived American South. The US was both eye-opening and deflationary for Cole: as recounted in the film’s voiceover, eloquently scripted by Peck using Cole’s own razor-sharp texts, he found Black Americans suffering similar oppression to Black South Africans, and struggled with his own multiple degrees of otherness.
That sense of withdrawal in photographs of Cole perhaps conceals bitterness that sapped him. His career began to sputter; eventually, he became destitute. As the voice of Cole, LaKeith Stanfield speaks with an aggrieved exhaustion. The narration becomes less caustically analytical and more insular and plaintive – diaristic reflections on the grief of coming of age under a brutish regime. “It is a lie to put things in the frame,” Cole decided, and for years he stopped shooting. The film becomes a remarkable display of grief over exile – from South Africa, from photography.
The fact the film is practically a feature-length montage of Cole’s photographs is testament to Peck ’s commitment to the archive. But his and editor Alexandra Strauss’s efforts to make the photographs more conspicuously ‘cinematic’ comes with its own distracting rhythm. The camera roams around the photographs with a sleek fluency, zooming in or sliding across them in an attempt to add vitality. The effect sometimes blurs the stunning formal relations in Cole’s photo graphs – fervid group interactions, or nods to Cartier-Bresson-style geometry.
There are other editorial flourishes too, like colouring the segregation signs a sickly red in otherwise black-and-white photographs, or creating a kind of CGI art gallery to ‘hang’ Cole’s final photographs in. Such details fail to open up Cole’s photography or interpret it on a deeper level; in their overdetermination, they instead short-circuit the way that a picture can slowly, and deliberately, reveal itself. When Cole’s nephew picks up the negatives from Switzerland, a thriller plot briefly emerges in the form of the puzzle surrounding their provenance. Peck cleverly juxtaposes this with broader political aftermaths – the release of Nelson Mandela a week before Cole’s death, testimony from the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission – as a reminder that for Cole there was no distinction between the personal, the political and the photographic: it was all “my reality, my urgency”.
► Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is in UK cinemas 7 March.