ERNEST COLE - QUOTATION

Ernest Cole belonged to a generation of great South African photographers like Peter Magubane, Alfred Khumalo, Bob Gosani, who clustered together on the pages of Drum magazine in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s. Ernesy Cole was a member of the Sophiatown Renaissance school of brilliant artists, writers and intellectuals. House of Bondage is an extraordinary photo essay by Ernest Cole. The book is a combination of astonishing feats: on one plane it is social history; on another it is a cultural discourse; on yet another plane it is an intellectual conversation; and on a further plane it is an ideological dialogue on photography. What interweaves these planes together in mutual reciprocity is the documentary style that inhabits House of Bondage. The book would seem to confirm Walker Evan's maxim that there are no documentary traditions in photography, only documentary styles. It is the historicity of form in photography which defines a historical problematic. House of Bondage bristles with historical issues. The first series of photographs, which configure a unified formal structurein the text, are a dialectical representation of that unending struggle between capital and labour. Cole portrays the actual process of the transformation of the perasant class, having been forced by government policy to abandon the rural areas, into an industrial proletariat in the gold-mines of Johannesburg.The founding of the gold-mining industry in our country is what ushered South Africainto modernity through industrialization.

-Ntongela Masilela, "In Remembrance", Isivivane [Berlin], Spring 1992.