‘Politically, it’s important. It’s important for humanity’: the long-lost civil rights images of Ernest Cole

A new Raoul Peck documentary showcases the recently rediscovered work of the photographer who drew parallels between apartheid South Africa and America’s battle for equality

A group of Black men stand naked in a line with their arms up, facing the wall, as they undergo a medical examination before being sent to work in the mines. The image is just one of many by the late Ernest Cole depicting the dehumanisation of Black people during apartheid. Writing for Ebony magazine in 1968, the South African photographer explained how he wanted his work to “show the world what the white South African had done to the Black”. Since the late 1950s, he had been chronicling, up close and in detail, the horrors of racial segregation for publications such as Drum and the New York Times and had become arguably the most significant photographer documenting the country’s oppressive regime.

“Ernest’s photos are the first ones that gave us an idea of what apartheid was, from the belly of the beast,” says Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck, whose documentary essay I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, won an Emmy in 2019. Now, with his new film, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Peck turns his focus to the triumphs and tragedies of Cole’s life, covering his time not only in South Africa but in the civil rights-era US.