Foam proudly presents the first overview of the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole. The exhibition includes parts of his archive, which had long been considered lost.
The overview was assembled in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, which in 2017 secured control of Cole’s archive. Cole is celebrated for his tireless documentation of Black lives in South Africa under apartheid: a regime of institutionalized racial segregation that was in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s.
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
This exhibition shows the rediscovery of 60.000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017. Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage.
Cole lived a nomadic life, exiled from his native South Africa for his photographic publication House of Bondage (1967). The chapters from this book form the narrative for this exhibition. The book openly denounced the apartheid regime and was promptly banned in South Africa. In risk of arrest, Cole had gone into exile in 1966. He would never return to South Africa again.

“When I say that people can be fired or arrested or abused or whipped or banished for trifles, I am not describing the exceptional case for the sake of being inflammatory. What I say is true – and most white South Africans would acknowledge it freely. They do not pretend these things are not happening. The essential cruelty of the situation is not that all blacks are virtuous and all whites villainous, but that the whites are conditioned not to see anything wrong in the injustices they impose on their black neighbors.”
( Ernest Cole, House of Bondage, 1967)

The book, published by Aperture, first published in 1967, has been lauded as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century, revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world for the first time and influencing generations of photographers around the globe. Reissued for contemporary audiences, this edition adds a chapter of unpublished work found in a recently resurfaced cache of negatives and recontextualizes this pivotal book for our time. Cole, a Black South African man, photographed the underbelly of apartheid in the 1950s and ’60s, often at great personal risk. He methodically captured the myriad forms of violence embedded in everyday life for the Black majority under the apartheid system—picturing its miners, its police, its hospitals, its schools. In 1966, Cole fled South Africa and smuggled out his negatives; House of Bondage was published the following year with his writings and first-person account. This edition retains the powerful story of the original while adding new perspectives on Cole’s life and the legacy of House of Bondage. It also features an added chapter—compiled and titled “Black Ingenuity” by Cole—of never-before-seen photographs of Black creative expression and cultural activity taking place under apartheid. Made available again nearly fifty-five years later, House of Bondage remains a visually powerful and politically incisive document of the apartheid era.