After James Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro”, the documentary maker tells the short life, told through his photos, of one of the greatest photographers of apartheid.
Ernest Cole was born in 1940 in a township from South Africa. He learned photography and then recorded the daily life of apartheid using photos often taken on the fly so as not to be arrested by the police. Cole published a book in 1967, House of Bondage, immediately banned, which forced him to leave the country. He takes refuge in New York, full of hope. But, like many South African immigrants, he never manages to adapt to this country where relations between whites and blacks, supposedly pacified, are distorted.
“The photo always lies”, he said, uncomfortably. He produces a report in the poor, black South, but he is despised: who is this foreigner who judges us? He fell into poverty at the age of 40, sold his devices, gradually dissolved into the fog of New York and died at the age of 49, a few days after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, which augured a new era. Bad kairos. Cole always suffered from never having been able to return to his country, which he nevertheless described as a “hell”.
A few years after his disappearance, a bank in Sweden, where Cole had made several stays, entrusted the photographer's nephew with 60,000 Agfa negatives stored in a safe. Who paid for their preservation? No information – 524 photos of Cole, among the best known, still remain blocked in Sweden… Raoul Peck's admirable and heartbreaking documentary, edited largely based on images of Cole, is like the tragic counterpart of his portrait of James Baldwin, the miraculous I Am Not Your Negro (2016): a film about a brilliant loser who should have become rich and famous.
Ernest Cole, photographer by Raoul Peck (USA, 2024, 1:45 a.m.). In theaters December 25.
