Raoul Peck recounts a pioneering photographer

“Some of these photos are iconic and everyone who was interested in South Africa or took part in the anti-apartheid struggle knows them. » When Raoul Peck (born in 1953) was contacted five years ago by the rights holders of the South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940–1990), he knows the images in his book The House of Servitudes (1967), a striking documentation of apartheid, but does not have its name in mind.

The director ofI Am Not Your Negro (2016), a gripping documentary about the writer James Baldwin, is touched by the work as well as by the trajectory of this artist, who entered history as one of the first black photojournalists but still too little known to the general public. “At first,” he says, “I wanted to help the family preserve the archives that needed to be digitized. » Quickly, he decided to dedicate a film to him, which will be released this Wednesday, December 25, under the title Ernest Cole, photographer.

An heir of Cartier-Bresson

This traces the destiny of a man passionate about imageswho enters a Johannesburg photography studio for the first time to clean the floors. Ten years later, the black magazine Drum publishes his heartbreaking photos of apartheid, where whites and blacks are separated by “Europeans only” banners. Quickly declared persona non grata by the government, it leaves South Africa for Europe then the United States, where he worked for the Magnum agency.

“We interviewed at length everyone who met Ernest Cole to draw from them their feelings, their memories, their vision. »

Raoul Peck

“He thinks he’s going to explode as an artist,” recalls the director. However, he is mainly asked to photograph black people, in poverty. He dreams of being Cartier-Bresson. A photographer is a photographer, not ‘a black photographer’. In Ernest’s papers, we found many fashion magazines and advertisements. It interested him. » Ernest Cole indeed receives a grant from the Ford Foundation to document the daily life of black populations in the southern United States… But the resulting book was not published, for some unknown reason.

A mysterious discovery

Ernest Cole stops photography at the end of the 1970sand spent the last years of his existence in total destitution. Telling your story required a long investigative work to Raoul Peck, who details: “What we did with my team was to look for everyone who met him in South Africa, in Sweden, in England, in the United States… And we got them all interviewed at length to draw from them their feelings, their memories, their vision. I have accumulated key moments, reflections, moods. »

The set brushes a extremely sensitive portraittold in the first person by the director himself in the French version, of a personality over whom a mystery still hangs: “In 2017, almost 60,000 negatives and photos are discovered in three large metal trunks in the vaults of a Swedish bank. There, the story turns into a thriller with the discovery of a treasure of which we all knew nothing, including the family. » How did they end up there? Who financed this deposit? “We are only at the beginning of the rediscovery of this great artist who was Ernest Cole. »