Ernest Cole: House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust - Part 1

Goodman Gallery is delighted to present part one of a three-part exhibition between the UK, Europe and South Africa by the late Ernest Cole. In collaboration with the Magnum Gallery, Paris and the Ernest Cole Family Trust, House of Bondage: Vintage works from the Ernest Cole Family Trust will present rare vintage prints by Cole that reveal the astonishing breadth of work created by the photographer during his brief career.

Following two major exhibitions in London at The Photographer’s Gallery and Autograph, and Cole’s publications House of Bondage and The True America, published by Aperture in 2022 and 2023, this show provides perspectives from South Africa and the wider continent, with artists, writers and curators examining Cole’s methodology and offering new insights into his work. Part l will take place at the London gallery this November. Part ll and lll will be shown in Magnum Gallery, Paris and Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, respectively, in January and February next year. While all three exhibitions include vintage prints selected from House of Bondage, each exhibition will be unique.

Cole’s book House of Bondage, which came out to significant attention in 1967, exposed the horror of the Apartheid regime. Over a period of seven years, Cole captured in his photographs, the myriad forms of violence embedded in the everyday life of the Black majority under Apartheid: at work, in the mines, in education, healthcare and on the street. In 1966 Cole fled South Africa, smuggling his negatives out of the country, to eventually settle in New York where House of Bondage was published the next year alongside a powerful introduction by Joe Lelyveld, the South African correspondent of the New York Times, who was himself expelled from South Africa in 1966.