Sean O'Toole
South African History Through the Photobook
Sean O'Toole - South African History through the Photobook
-My name’s Sean O'Toole, I’m a journalist, writer, editor, and occasional curator. I live in Cape Town, that’s where I’m speaking from, and it’s why the light is also fading, unfortunately, we’re heading into winter. My talk, from what you see on the screen, is about a particular book, came out in ‘67, by Ernest Cole, but it’s more broadly about the culture of book censorship and photography, big subjects, ones that I’m interested in. I’ve worked as a journalist, particularly in the arts sphere, for more than two decades. Must’ve been about more than 15 years ago now, I had a regular column in “The Sunday Times” where I wrote about photography and would interview a number of photographers, Dave Goldblatt, Peter Magubane, Santu Mofokeng. South Africa’s produced extraordinary photographers, and many of those photographers their ambition is defined by wanting to produce a photobook. So I suppose, fairly, you’re wondering, what the hell is a photobook? And it’s a fair question. I suppose I would point you to this. It’s a three-part volume, it started coming out in 2004, and it collected what were considered the best examples of photobooks made in the last 150 years, and I provided a little definition there that might be useful: “A photobook is a book, with or without text, where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs.” Fairly simple. A photobook is a book of photographs, principally. Can have some text. I mean, if you look at Martin Parr’s and Gerry Badger’s book, here’s has an example from the 1850s, cyanotypes, incredibly beautiful.
There’s various examples. Those of you who are fans of contemporary art would know the painter Ed Ruscha. Here’s an example of one of his photobooks, tiny little book called “Some Los Angeles Apartments,” and the title pretty much gives it away, the image on the right, Los Angeles apartments. It’s not all that gonzo. Here’s a famous South African photobook published in 1967, the same year as Ernest Cole’s photobook, by Sam Haskins, who was probably the most famous South African photographer in the 1960s. Another example of a photobook, very different, came out in the 1980s, edited by Omar Badsha, and included two dozen photographers, amongst them David Goldblatt. The cover photograph, interestingly, is a very young Guy Tillim. It’s the first instance, on the top right there, where David Goldblatt publishes his photographs made with a New York Times journalist, Joel Lelyveld, Joe Lelyveld of the transported of KwaNdebele. It’s commuters coming from the Bantustans into Pretoria. Remember the name Joe Lelyveld, I’ll return to it a bit later. So why the photobook? You know, I’m just scene-setting here so that you understand, when I get to Ernest Cole, how I arrived there. I’m, I suppose, a contributor. I’m not a photographer, I’m a writer, and over the years, I’ve befriended many photographers. So for instance, this remarkable book by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse came out in 2014. It includes a number of tiny little booklets inside, each with an essay or a short story. The writer Ivan Vladislavic contributed, Linda Silverman, Achille Mbembe, and someone called Sean O'Toole.
I wrote mainly about my wife, strangely, not about the building. I wrote about when we were not yet married and we went to visit Ponte. So I’m sort of implicated. Here’s another book by a rising star of South African photography, Lindokuhle Sobekwa. He’s just yesterday been signed by the Goodman Gallery. This was a book that came out two years ago, called “Daleside,” and it looks at a community south of Johannesburg. Interestingly enough, Lindo’s mother once worked as a domestic worker, and when he used to visit her as a young child, he wasn’t allowed into the homes, so as a adult and a man with a vocation as a photographer, he returned there, and he made these extraordinary, very intimate photographs of young, mainly white, South Africans, seen by a young Black man. It’s a remarkable book. There’s the individual books, but there’s the culture that they speak to. I just did a little screen grab here. The art world became interested in photography more concentratedly, probably, in the 1990s, and with it came an interest in the history of photography. So this is a screenshot of a Christie’s sale from 2008. It was the first sort of concentrated sale looking at photobooks. I’ll direct your attention to the total that was achieved by the sale, $2.6 million, of probably, I think, yeah, 176 lots. It’s a substantial amount when you consider these are books, these are not unique books that were printed in multiple. I’ll show you some examples.
Here’s Dorothea Lange’s book that was sold in that sale, sold for $23,000. I mean, if you’re a collector of painting, it’s probably small change, but that’s definitely not what the book sold for when it first appeared. Another book, Weegee’s “Naked City,” sold in that same auction for $37,000. Partly, the price, in this case, was because it included letters from Weegee, the famous 1930s crime photographer, who spoke about some of the photographs in there. Here’s where you start to see the prices ratchet up. Same sale, Hans Bellmer, a photobook that he made, $73,000. Remember Ed Ruscha, that I mentioned earlier, there’s a complete set of all the photobooks that he made in the '60s and '70s, there are 19 in total, sold for $121,000. Some of these photobooks are now highly collectible individually, and also iconic. “Various Small Fires,” you’ll see there, Bruce Nauman famously parodied and made his own photobook. So there’s already a conversation that’s longstanding, not only within the photography community, but within the art world. So my talk looks at South Africa. Here’s a photo of a well-known bookstore in Cape Town, Clarke’s, not a great photo, so you can see why I write about photography rather than take it, but the display largely, or almost exclusively, focuses on South African books. I don’t know if you can see my cursor, but there’s even a photobook by our Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee, who, before he was a writer, was a very enthusiastic photographer. If you go upstairs into the collectible book section, this is Henrietta Dax, famous personality in Cape Town, owner of Clarke’s Book, and a real connoisseur of books, and she has a whole section devoted to photography books. I would often go browse there.
The prices weren’t in the hundreds, or even the ten thousands of dollars. You can pick them up around R500, which is, given our diminishing currency, probably like $10, up to, yeah, Ernest Cole’s book is now fairly collectible. So this is just the background. I suppose I became interested in what is the meaning of these books other than the individual project, and, you know, what is the history of these books? 'Cause often, when one starts something, it’s fairly casually, and you build your knowledge gradually, and I suppose I became like the figure in this short story, a very famous short story by the Argentinian writer, Borges, someone who’s questing for a book, a catalogue of catalogues. So I took that idea to the foundation that Wendy generously helped establish in Cape Town, A4 Arts Foundation, and I did a six months’ residency with no real purpose, other than to investigate what are all the books out there, published since ‘45 until the present, by South Africans, of South Africa, about, so, you know, a fairly open-ended inquiry, and it was literally playing around with a photocopier, and reassembling famous photographs. The woman with the long socks is from Sam Haskins’ book. You can see Hendrik Verwoerd on the right, addressing the public.
Just above him is a very famous photograph, taken by Peter Magubane, of a murder in Alexandria. The composite image next to it is from Ernest Cole’s “House of Bondage,” and next to that is Roger Ballen. These are all, like, key protagonists in the photobook in South Africa, and that’s literally what playing around in a arts foundation looks like. I took my library, it was heavy damn heavy , packed it into many bags, and drove up and down, and then sat trying to sort of make sense of this accumulated weight of books. I think there was something there, and Josh Ginsburg, who is the director of A4 Arts Foundation one day said, “Let’s make an exhibition,” which I did. So I’ll show you a few slides of the exhibition, but it was called “Photo book! Photo-book! Photobook!” Either it’s a very unimaginative title or it is a problem in three words, I tend to look at the latter, because it might be easy to define what a photobook is, it’s a book principally made up of photographs, but when one reads around the photobook, people can’t even decide on how to spell it. Is it two things, photo book, is it hyphenated, or is it, in the German tradition, just smooshed together? So rather than try and dictate an answer, I just used that as a prompt to create the exhibition. Here’s the wall text, which just explains the scope of it, I’m not going to go into that, but as you entered, the first book you would encounter was Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse’s “Ponte,” which is up there on the left there, and what they generously did was show all the maquettes that led to the production of this book.
The book is iconic, well-known, it won the Deutsche Borse photography prize in London, in 2015, and it went through many, many evolutions, and this was the marvellous thing that they did here, which is in creating this cabinet where they showcased all the possibilities that they explored before they finally settled on that box. On the right is a slide of a vitrine with a couple of books, and then beyond it, examples of contemporary art. There’s a photograph by Zander Blom, another by Roger Ballen and Robin Ruder. And the idea was to kind of suggest that the book isn’t unrelated from artistic practise. The book has many ways that it plugs into artistic practise as well as photographic practise, and I wanted to sort of point in all those directions. The exhibition basically was chronological, so it involved a display of books like you see on the right, of the musicologist Hugh Tracey’s very early book from the 50s, documenting various types of dances by migrant workers, but it was interrupted by something like you would see on the left, where there would be these little nodes where I would display books that are thematically related. South Africa has an incredible history of botanical art that predates photography. If you are a book collector, you would know books by Levaillant, the French naturalist and adventurer, highly prized, very expensive. These kind of books that I’m showing on the left would’ve extended on that history. Are they photobooks?
They weren’t published as such, most of them are gardening manuals, but, you know, if one actually pauses on them, there’re a couple of key protagonists, one of whom was, and I hope I pronounce her name correct, Sima Eliovson, whose husband, Ezra Eliovson, was a key member of the photographic societies that were very powerful after the post war, and Sima was a great authority on gardens, but also believed in the necessity of documenting the flowers. She didn’t practise drawing, and to the extent that she took up photography, and if you look at the blurbs at the back of her book, she posing with her Rolleiflex and very much identified. There’s a book at the top right there by the architect Gawie Fagan’s wife, Gwen, about the roses at the Cape. There’s a real extraordinary history if you just pause on certain areas. So this was opening night, and I show it just to thank Wendy for enabling it. The man wearing the polite hat is Josh Ginsburg, the director of A4. Standing in front of him is our illustrious Springbok rugby captain, Siya Kolisi, with his wife and brother-in-law. And Wendy ambushed me and asked me to walk Siya through the exhibition, and it was interesting. I put this up for a reason. When I took Siya through, I could see much of what I was talking about was moderately to not very interesting, but when we got to “House of Bondage,” and the exhibition was browseable, you could pick up books and look at them, he disappeared, he disappeared into the book.
There was something extraordinary that happened, and the book held his attention, not my narrative. It is an extraordinary book. It’s made by this man, Ernest Cole, born in Pretoria in 1940, died in exile in New York, in 1990. This is from his exile period in New York. Ernest Cole was a key figure in this exhibition. Sorry, I just want to check time. We devoted a whole wall to him, there on the left, and we included various works that kind of referenced “House of Bondage.” So on your right is a photograph that, if you’re familiar with Ernest Cole, or if you’ve travelled to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, you might recognise that photo, but it’s not Ernest Cole’s, it’s taken by his great rival at “Drum Magazine,” Peter Magubane, who happened to take the same photo. I interviewed Jurgen Schadeberg once, who said Ernest Cole left “Drum Magazine” where he worked as a young photographer, because he had dust-up or a punch-up with Peter Magubane. Two very strong personalities. The book that is very dramatically held closed on a plinth there, it’s a key book, it’s actually the, it gives shape to the talk. I’ll return to it, I’ll show you in a moment. In a sense, having answered what is a photobook, I want to devote the rest of my talk to what is the risk of making a photobook? There’s an easy answer. Most publishers, and booksellers, and artists will tell you it’s financial, they don’t sell, they’re usually commercial failures, and then through some magical act of history, they become famous. I mean, an example would be David Goldblatt’s “Some Afrikaners,” his second book.
It was published in an edition of 1,000, it spectacularly flopped, most of them got pulped, and it’s now hugely collectible. But that’s not the risk that I’m interested in. I’m interested in the risk that this writer, Nadine Gordimer, encountered in basically practising her vocation, being a writer. She had very defined ideas of equality and liberty in apartheid South Africa, and consequentially, many of her books, her novels, were banned, and if you read Nadine Gordimer’s essays, many of them dwell on the culture of censorship that prevailed in South Africa. You know, I think it started to take on a very nasty bent particularly after 1963, when there were new censorship laws passed, and as Nadine Gordimer writes, the laws were so “stringent, sin-mongering and all-devouring,” and also, ironically, a great business proposition because there was such a steady stream of bannings that a commercial publisher, Jacobsens, was able to issue this index which you would subscribe to and you would receive weekly updates that you could put into this manual, so it was essentially always updating. Bear in mind, you know, my talk is all pre-internet. You know, a lot of this is actually redundant in the age of the internet, but the book, at that point, represented the kind of apex of information, and it wasn’t something like the internet.
Computing was only coming slowly online, mainly through the mining houses, so a book like this would be owned by importers, book publishers, and librarians at state, university, or even private libraries, and it was a way to check what books are banned, and it would just be constantly updated. I mean, if you… And it’s alphabetical, and it didn’t only include books, it would include calendars, pamphlets, stickers, anything that was potentially, in the terms of the censor, objectionable literature, and it’s alphabetized, so if you look at when “House of Bondage,” look it up, it appears, if you go, and let’s just find that, yeah, “House of Assignation,” I mean, I think one could tell pretty much what’s going on in there. “House of Bondage,” “House of Deceit,” “House of Desire,” “House of Dreams.” It wasn’t only political books that were banned. I think the apartheid censors were fundamentally interested in proscribing anything to do with sex, sexuality, gender, and then anything that was, shall we say, left of centre, politically, so even manuals on agrarian peasant farming would be banned. It’s quite extraordinary when you read through this. Nadine Gordimer, if you are interested, published an extraordinary essay about going to the Jo'burg public library in ‘73, and asking to read this book, which was kept in a special collection, and just spent the whole day reading the listings, seeing what was in there.
Another writer who I think you would all be familiar with, J.M. Coetzee, also spent time with it and wrote a full manuscript for an unpublished novel in the early '70s, based on an encounter with Jacobsens Index. It’s an extraordinary book, yet almost impossible to find. For the exhibition, we were lucky to find one at the University of Stellenbosch, just outside Cape Town, where a librarian had not thrown it away. After it’s loaning to us, the useless object was then taken into special collections at the university and no longer allowed to be loaned out. There is a darker side to this. I mean, we know of Nazi book burnings, which were highly symbolic acts, but the apartheid state, because of that sort of steady drumroll of censorship, which, particularly through the '60s and '70s, was a very well-oiled machine, resulted in huge numbers of books either being detained at customs or being seized at libraries. And, you know, books occupy physical space, and it became a problem of warehousing, so this was a well-known, or a photograph that was first published in '71 in the “Wits Student,” which is the student newspaper at the University of Witwatersrand, and was again circulated in 2018, showing, essentially, seized books being burnt at a large furnace. For those of you who are South African, some of the blast furnaces at ISCOR were also used, because they had the scale. I mean, it’s quite extraordinary. I didn’t know this history until I started researching the photobook. So which photobooks, particularly, were banned?
I mean, that’s interesting, because it’s not just Ernest Cole’s. Probably the most famous early one would be Sam Haskins’ book, “Five Girls.” I mentioned Sam earlier. He was a mentor and a role model to a very young David Goldblatt. This is his first book, “Five Girls,” photographed when he was living in Johannesburg. So Sam Haskins was Afrikaans, he called himself a detribalized Afrikaner, born in Kroonstad, lived in Northcliff, in Johannesburg, and very much of the time. He studied in London, and you can see him bringing back the swinging London to very dour Johannesburg, in the ‘60s. That’s Sam, there. It’s a photograph that David shared with me when Sam died. David contacted me and asked me to please write an obituary for Sam Haskins in “The Sunday Times.” It’s dated '65, so you can see when David comes into Sam Haskins’ orbit. For those of you that do know David Goldblatt, his first book is called “On the Mines,” published in ‘73, with Nadine Gordimer, and the first few photographs look like they were taken by Sam Haskins, very close relationship. For those of you who don’t know Sam Haskins, you might remember the book “Cowboy Kate” that came out after “Five Girls.” Hugely influential. It was one of the biggest-selling photobooks ever, an icon of, particularly, '60s publishing, was not published in South Africa, but was entirely photographed here, but published in, jointly published in New York and London at the same time. Again, showing Christie’s, the book was sold a number of years ago, the maquette, the basic model for it, for 35,000 pounds. Iconic book.
For those of you who love pop, this is Rihanna’s sock collaboration with Stance, and I just couldn’t find the photo, but there’s one from this shoot that directly references Sam Haskins’ photograph from “Five Girls.” This book was banned in ‘69 because of nudity. Other books that were banned, “Letter to Farzanah,” it’s Omar Badsha’s debut photobook. When you look at the photographs, the book was brought out to coincide with a UN project about children, so why would this be threatening? The book was published by Fatima Meer, who was a banned activist, so hence, anything that was attached to her institute would be banned. Similar, here’s a book by Eli Weinberg, who was a South African Jew, member of the South African Communist Party. When it was banned, he consequently became a banned person, as was the apartheid language, and was reduced to becoming a photographer, and made many photographs, particularly of protests and union politics. The original edition of this was published by the international, or IDAF, sorry, in 1980, and was summarily banned, This is a later edition when it was unbanned. But you can sort of see the broad sort of spread. And here we get to Ernest Cole’s book. So it originally comes out in 1967, in New York, and is published a few months later, in London. I mean, it’s important to bear in mind that books, still, even today, are very national enterprises, so the fact that you published in New York doesn’t mean it will be seen, particularly in other, let’s say, anglophone countries, so, you know, Sam Haskins would have to go get a deal both in London and New York, from separate publishers, and the same applied to Ernest Cole.
I’ll run through it very briefly, just so you kind of get a sense of what you’re encountering. So there’s a kind of composite, almost collaged cover. There’s a hint of the segregation in this opening spread, which shows a crowded train station. I remember these from the '80s, because I would catch the train from Pretoria to Johannesburg, and you would have very crowded platforms for Black commuters, who were not allowed to spill over into the white cabins. There’s the photo that looks similar to the one of Peter Magubane, but is different. This is Ernest Cole’s photographs, perhaps one of the most iconic, from the “House of Bondage.” What is it showing? It’s showing young men who are mining recruits for the mining houses in and around Johannesburg, and they’re undergoing medical inspection. Those are the facts of the photograph, but in terms of what it portrays, a lack of dignity, perhaps, the kind of mechanisation of labour. There are many things that the photo encompasses as a possibility. It was a photobook, but it featured substantial amount of text. The text was written as if written by Ernest Cole, but it actually was ghost written by a very prominent “Life Magazine” journalist, Thomas Flaherty, and presented very dramatically, with photographs by Ernest Cole. I’ll just .
There’s 18 chapters, and they look at various facets of Black urban life. So bear in mind, Sam Haskins, in the same year, publishes “African Image,” which looks at sort of the tribal subject, if one wants to put it that way. Ernest Cole’s book refuses that. It looks very much at Black contemporary urban life in apartheid South Africa, going to work in crowded commuter trains, being a domestic helper, being away from home, living in white suburbs. Many of these scenes endure. These are scenes from the '60s, but if you had to walk around contemporary South Africa, it’s not unusual to see a Black man walking domestic pets owned by wealthy white South Africans. Interestingly enough, if you are familiar with Nadine Gordimer, she wrote a short story that was published in “The New Yorker,” very much about trying to understand the psychology of a Black man who’s walking pets for wealthy white South Africans. Other subjects included urban crime, and, for example, Ernest Cole documented muggings. Some of the themes of the book were suggested by his collaborator, and this is when Cole is making the book in the early '60s. His collaborator was Joe Lelyveld, the New York Times journalist at the time, foreign correspondent, based in Johannesburg, and they worked on numerous stories that were published in “The New York Times” at that time, and this enabled, I suppose, Ernest Cole to develop some of his story ideas, also get funding, because the works would be published in a very prominent newspaper, but already then, the kind of pincers were tightening, and Joe Lelyveld was eventually, I think it was in '66, refused, what was the word?
Well, he was basically kicked out of South Africa by the government. He was refused a licence to be a foreign reporter in South Africa. This particular photograph depicts education, Black education, in a very unequal society, also looks at homelessness, particularly youth homelessness, and looks very plainly at municipal signage. And I think apartheid is a big word, but it also manifested in a very petty way. Many Americans would be familiar with similar scenes. Gordon Parks, the great American photographer, documented similar things, where the doctrine of separate but equal prevailed. So I wanted to, just before talking a little bit about the book and its banning, just sketch, maybe, some things that fill in a bit of a history. The book’s called “House of Bondage.” It’s not an original title. If you go back to the 1890s in the US, there was a strong sense of that phrase, which has a biblical origin, being allied to the struggle for equality amongst African Americans in an unequal America. So here’s a very early example of a book of slave narratives that came out in the 1890s, it just collects oral histories of slaves, titled “House of Bondage.” The reason I mention this is I’m trying to sort of sketch these relationships between South Africa and the US that are longstanding. The man on the left there is one of the founders of the current ruling party, the African National Congress, a remarkable man. He wrote a book called “Native Life in South Africa,” that was very much modelled on the great American intellectual, W.E. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” and they actually corresponded with each other.
There’s examples of postcards that Plaatjie wrote to Du Bois. Here’s another letter that Plaatjie wrote to Du Bois, and I’m trying to sort of hint at why “House of Bondage” appears in America and not South Africa. Here’s Plaatjie saying, “I notice American magazines and newspapers have a keener interest in Africa than perhaps Africa has in itself,” and he’s asking whether, this is Plaatjie, whether his novel, “Mhudi,” might be picked up in the US. There’s other examples of these very intimate relations between iconic figures. For South Africans, Peter Clarke is a very important artist, perhaps overlooked in some ways, but not forgotten, a remarkable Cape artist. He was not only a very accomplished graphic artist, but a writer. He did the residency in Ohio. He won a major award in the '50s that got him into contact with the American poet, Langston Hughes, and for many years, they wrote to each other. The poster with the hand and the dove, on the right, is from the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which, when it opened, Peter designed the poster, and had a quote by Langston Hughes. Just these sort of intimate connections. James Baldwin, very much a writer that for our current generation of youths is very meaningful, particularly to the Black Lives Matter movement, a big figure in American cultural life. This is him on the left, painted by the remarkable painter, Beauford Delaney, who was James Baldwin’s model of an artist.
This is a very important essay that James Baldwin wrote in 1980 titled “Notes on 'The House of Bondage.’” I’m not going to read the passage, but the point is that this title, “House of Bondage,” didn’t come out of nowhere. It was resonant with meaning, it spoke not only to South African experience, but to readers in the United States, where the book would appear, the title would immediately invoke a kind of, in ‘67, the history of the civil rights, the very present history of the civil rights, but a longer history of struggle for racial equality. So the book appears in '67. It includes a introduction by Joe Lelyveld who is, for those of you who live in New York and are a “New York Times” reader, is not someone that needs much introduction. Hugely important editor and foreign correspondent. For those of you who are South Africans that are listening, his book from 1985, “Move Your Shadow,” remarkable book, extraordinary prose, such an accomplished writer, and yet not just all style. The reporting on there is remarkable. There’s a passage in there where he and David Goldblatt travel to a place north of Pretoria, and charter a bus in the morning, with commuters coming into town, and Lelyveld, over a couple of pages, just shares the misery of this five-hour journey to work that, for some people, starts at 2:00 in the morning. Extraordinary book. It also includes a small little passage on Ernest Cole. But he’s a key figure in helping Ernest Cole when he decides to go into exile in 1967 with this whack of photographs showing South Africa that is, and wanting to make it into a book.
So when the book appears in '67, of course, one of the first places that gives it recognition is “The New York Times.” It gives it a double-page spread, which is, you know, even in today’s terms, a PR would tell you, a coup, and it includes some of his photographs. Unfortunately, I don’t have a better slide, but you can recognise some of the key images there. The book gets noticed, it even gets put on “The New York Times” Must Buy Christmas books, which is important. It also gets reviewed by this man, a South African literary writer who’s living in exile in the United States, Daniel Kunene. He reviews it for “The Los Angeles Times.” And another exile, Dan Jacobson, reviews it for “The Guardian” in 1968, so that would be in anticipation of its English launch. Jacobson’s also a run afoul of the censorship laws here, a novelist who rubs up against the very strict, very Calvinist, very antisemitic, in some senses, apartheid system. and is very enthusiastic about this book. I’ll mention why these nods from eminent people are important, in a moment, but in February 1968, “Ebony” magazine, which is a hugely important magazine for African Americans, and particularly during the civil rights period, devotes, I think it’s seven pages, to punting Ernest Cole’s book under the very unambiguous headline, “My Country, My Hell,” and it includes a first-person narrative by Ernest Cole, that corrects some of the errors that appear in “House of Bondage,” just sort of factual and chronological errors, and explains why he does this book. Interestingly enough, the prompt to want to work on “The House of Bondage” came from being gifted a photobook.
He was given the great French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “The Decisive Moment,” and that set in motion, or gave shape, to an ambition. He wanted to make a photobook that gathered all these photographs of these encounters he was having, and show something about South Africa, the experience, as Sol Plaatjie might have said, of waking up in a country, if not a slave, close to it. Here are spreads from the “Ebony,” utilising various photographs from “House of Bondage.” You know, you can see from the photographs that it’s very much a documentary style of photography. It’s recording conditions, on the top left, of mine workers. The young man being arrested by a Black policeman, that would be for offences with identity documents. On the top right is criminality and poverty in the city. So sort of, you know, covering various topics. Also looking at education, health, you know, very broad topics that would very much slot into a news publication. So the book gets published in '67, late '67, and in May '68, this notice appears in the South African Government Gazette. It’s item number 6, “House of Bondage,” gets published just after, just appears after “The Hot Blood of Youth.” You can see the sweating of the censors. I mean, it must have been a very strange enterprise to be involved with that. Here’s a passage that I’m going to sort of lead out with it, but it’s something that Ernest Cole writes very late in the book, because he looks at how the apartheid government would target particular individuals and banish them to rural areas. We all know, for example, of Winnie Mandela’s banishment from Johannesburg to Brandfort, and I will read it, just to emphasise it. “Banishment is the cruellest and most effective weapon that the South African government has yet devised to punish its foes and intimidate potential opposition.”
So I want to take that word banishment and just apply it to Ernest Cole. He voluntarily went into exile, but it turned into a form of banishment. So just to give a little bit of history there, Ernest Cole was born in 1940, and in the racial taxonomy of the time, would’ve been a Black man, but saw an opportunity in sort of playing with the racial classification system and got himself racially reclassified as coloured, or mixed race, in South Africa. There were certain permissions that came with that. Black South Africans were not regarded as citizens of South Africa, they were allocated to various Bantustans, and could not, therefore, hold passports, and therefore couldn’t travel, whereas mixed-race South Africans were entitled to passports. This, Cole used. He smuggled his photographs out the country, and said he was going on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in France, he said he was a Catholic, and he snuck out, quite legally. The book appeared, it was banned a few months later, and he was, he was refused reentry into South Africa, so he was essentially, functionally, banished from South Africa, he couldn’t return. So the book comes out '67, and suddenly, this young man in his late 20s has to make a life in the US. The book has a lot of impact, as is suggested by some of the reviews, both in South Africa, it gets banned from importation, but also in the US. He wins a Ford Foundation grant and starts documenting both urban life, urban Black life in the US, as well as the experience of sharecroppers living in the South, with a view to making a follow-up book. It doesn’t happen. He also starts an association in Sweden, and travels there, does some photographing, but by about '74, he just disappears. There are periods when he’s homeless.
So let me, sorry, just to jump ahead, these are unpublished photographs that Ernest Cole took during the early '70s, when he was living in New York and working with the Ford Foundation Fellowship, and he didn’t only take black and white photographs. Some wonderful photos just capture the zing of New York in the early '70s, changing fashion, and you can sort of see the paisley of the '60s moving over into the '70s. These are Southern sharecroppers that he was documenting. There was also a relationship that is very clear when you look at the photographs, happening in the background, but it’s only very visible in the photographs. There’s recurring people that he documents. But increasingly, he begins to disappear, and then there’s just a hard disappearance in '74, and Ernest Cole appears very briefly in Joseph Lelyveld’s book from '84, where Lelyveld says he thinks he wasn’t cut out for New York and he should have returned to South Africa, but he couldn’t, and he lived an itinerant, often homeless life, and died in 1990, about a week after the famous announcement that all the political parties would be unbanned and political prisoners would be released. He never returned to South Africa. It’s a great shame, tragedy, never mind shame. His book was still banned into the early '90s. In 1990, it had a very limited unbanning and could be accessed at universities, but this is the first instance where Ernest Cole’s photographs were exhibited in South Africa. This is in 1995, it was a travelling exhibition. It premiered, or launched, at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, or Makhanda, now, and travelled to the United Kingdom, and also went to Johannesburg. Interestingly enough, you can see some of the people who also appeared on the show. I mentioned Eli Weinberg a bit earlier, who went into exile because of all the bannings, and Leon Levson, who had a studio in Johannesburg.
Those of you who know Wendy’s great passion, Irma Stern, the South African painter, Leon Levson made remarkable photographs of. All these forgotten people recovered. So this was the first instance where the books, I mean, not the books, the photos, jump out of the books and have their own agency on the wall, but arguably, Ernest Cole enters the public imagination decisively, emphatically, unequivocally, in 2001, with the opening of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, which very much tries to take the visitor through apartheid South Africa by invoking and using a lot of the photographs of that time, and Ernest Cole’s photographs became hugely important. This particular photograph from “House of Bondage” is very large. Here, you can see a hole at the top, the white man looking at the photographs, all from “House of Bondage.” These photographs had a huge impact. I remember when I saw them, I’d never seen them before, and yes, I’d recognised some of the scenes, say, from my commutes to Johannesburg in the '80s, but these things captured something with such extraordinary power and clarity. And for those of you who would remember John Matshikiza, his father was the remarkable musician, one of the players, and I think, composers, of the travelling musical, “King Kong,” John Matshikiza, an actor, a playwright, and also a wonderful editorialist, very jokey, but he wrote a remarkable editorial, opinion editorial, for the “Mail & Guardian” in 2001 about the Apartheid Museum, broadly wondering whether apartheid was dead, and whether a museum commemorating something that was still very much alive in the everyday was worthwhile, but he said notwithstanding all of that, Ernest Cole’s photographs have something that is truly striking. I mean, there’s a passage here where he says, “Here, at last, we come to grips with what apartheid really meant, the numbing, humdrum horror of a black person’s daily existence.” I would recommend finding that John Matshikiza.
If you can’t find it, ask through Wendy or Lockdown University, and I’d be happy to share it. I want to end on, perhaps, a unhappy but happy photograph of Ernest Cole, taken roundabout the time that his book’s out, he is visible in the world. Important that we also remember what he looked like, what his aspiration looked like. I think it’s certainly projected through the warmth of the man that we encounter here. I hope the talk’s been enlightening. The photobook is many things. It’s a way to appreciate photography, it’s increasingly becoming a financial instrument, as some of those auction results hinted at, but it’s also a way to know where you’re from and to measure the distance between then and now. So thank you very much. If there are any questions, I see there are, so I’ll go through them.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: From Annette: “Are you saying that the international community only became interested in photography in the 1990s, or South Africa only became in the '90s?”
A: No, sorry, so in the preamble, what I was trying to say is that the art world, there was greater interest in photography, certainly in the 1990s, and that’s into the 2000s, 2010s. If you go to an art fair now, you’d be hard pressed to find much photography. There was this huge uptake of interest in exhibiting photography, showing photography, buying photography. The first photograph to sell for over a million dollars happened in the early 2000s, so that’s the period I’m talking about.
Q: From Josie Adler: “Is there a photobook of early labour photos, particularly of women? Is Eli Weinberg’s book a photobook?”
A: Definitely, Eli Weinberg’s book is decisively, unambiguously a photobook. There are some remarkable books on Johannesburg at the turn of the 20th century that are all about labour conditions, both of Black and white, Black and white individuals, also Chinese, and then some women are portrayed in them.
Q: Monty Golden asks: “Are there photobooks about the Boer War and South Africa’s involvement in World War I and II?”
A: Yes, so there’s Boer War photos, less so, because at the time, most of the images were rendered, if you think of “The News of the World” illustrations, they were still sending artists to make drawings. I’m not so sure about World War I, but World War II, definitely. I just, it’s on the tip of my tongue, Constance Stuart Larrabee was a war correspondent in the mould of Lee Miller, for “Vogue,” and she… After she moved to the US, the Smithsonian gave her a big exhibition, and they did publish a book of her photographs from World War II, so that’s Constance Stuart Larrabee.
Q: Barbara Greece asks: “How about the photobook by Norman Seeff?”
A: I’ve tried to keep it to South Africa’s, but yeah, Sam Haskins, David Bailey, all that remarkable flourishing of fashion photography, particularly in the '60s.
Q: There’s Roman: “Do you think a picture can capture more than most words?”
A: Mm, I think there’s an interesting relationship between images and text. Images can be fairly passive in that they can say a lot but nothing, and they need words to help guide us where to look, what to think, you know, understand some of the context, but words don’t exhaust an image, I don’t think.
Thankfully, sorry, thank you, Rosemary. “This chimes very loudly with the book-banning that is going on right now in the USA. Sadly, book banning and the controlling of information does not stop.”
Q: And Lorna? No Lorna, okay. Sorry, I’m just quickly going through these. “So there’s a book, how about books on the arts in South Africa that always had very vibrant theatre, dance, and opera?”
A: There are examples of those books. I’ve tried to sort of concentrate on one book that maybe illustrates some of the risks beyond, let’s say, financial or creative risk, something that was truly existential when Ernest Cole decided to travel to the US and assemble his photographs into a book. He had an inkling of what may happen, but when it matured, his life irrevocably changed. I think there’s wonderful books about flowers, architecture, certainly theatre and dance, that are extraordinary in and of themselves, and are brave, because people committed their careers to making these books. I didn’t… I suppose we could speak at length about all of these, but I wanted to point to a book that maybe exceeded the discrete realm of just the photobook and the art world, that really speaks to South African history.
Eileen Nash is correct. She said “'House of Bondage’ was reissued in 2022.” Interestingly, the new edition includes an extra chapter, and Ernest Cole was a huge jazz fan, so the original ‘67 edition did not include photographs that in contemporary terms are called depictions of Black joy. The new edition does, and shows carousing, music-making, Black South Africans at leisure. It’s important to acknowledge that it wasn’t only suffering. People managed to carve out spaces of intimacy and pleasure.
“I have a copy of,” this is from Nicholas Katzen, “I have a copy of Cole’s book which I bought secondhand 35 years ago. I’ve treasured it ever since.” I’m delighted to read that.
Josie Adler, she writes the word, or the name, sorry, Santu Mofokeng. For those of you who are interested in South African photography, I would highly recommend Santu Mofokeng’s book, “Stories.” It came out, I think, four or five years ago. It’s a wacker! It comes in a giant box and features inside, if I’m not mistaken, 21 little books inside, and really showcases Santu Mofokeng to be one of the most extraordinary photographers of the last half-century in South Africa.
Q: Maria asks, “What is the title of Borges’s short story?”
A: “The Library of Babel.”
And there we got through all the questions, so thank you very much. Pumi, I don’t know if you want to chime in. No.
I must always find the unmute button at these things. But a very amazing and fascinating talk, Sean. Thank you so, so much. There was a question that I answered privately, but maybe for everybody else that may have missed that, we are going to have, in a couple of weeks, a talk called “I See a Different View” by a duo of youth and young photographers out of Soweto, and I think that would be a fascinating kind of left hand to the right hand that, Sean, you have painted so beautifully around the images depicting South Africa in the past, and kind of looking forward and looking today in how South Africans have reimagined themselves, and what’s different, and what’s new.
Yeah.
So thank you.
Thank you. A last question
Wonderful!
by David, asked about Anne Fischer. To my knowledge Anne Fischer hasn’t produced a photobook. I have met a visiting American art historian who’s doing her doctoral studies on Anne Fischer, and these are often the ways in which forgotten or neglected photographers are recovered, so watch this space.