The Brooklyn Rail

We are used to thinking of evil as something easily discernible, an alien intrusion that can be excised with enough willpower. However, if there is anything that the twentieth century has taught us with its litany of atrocities and crimes—together with the work of those philosophers that studied these questions closely, from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault—it is that power and oppression are less a “thing” than a system or a web of relations, all the more pervasive because it’s so often sanctioned by law and perpetuated by repressive institutions and bureaucracies.

When it was first published in New York in 1967, House of Bondage by Ernest Cole was hailed as the first all-out denunciation of the system of apartheid, produced by an artist who had witnessed it first-hand and had often experienced its violence himself. (Cole left school at sixteen in protest against the Bantu Education Act and later was only able to practice his profession thanks to a reclassification from “Black” to “Colored”). As affecting and poignant as they are, the photographs in this watershed photobook are less a catalog of horrors and humiliations, although these too are there for all to see, than a shrewd, unflinching dissection of the ways apartheid penetrated and ruled every aspect of South African society, no matter how seemingly innocuous. The photos, which Cole took while on assignment, were smuggled to America and subsequently organized in thematic chapters that are accompanied by incredibly perceptive texts written by Cole. The exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage, which is now on view at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, gives a comprehensive account of all of this.

Organized across two floors, the exhibition preserves the original groupings and uses snippets of Cole’s texts as elucidations. Some of the photographs document the state of dejection and poverty into which South African Black people were forced under apartheid. The first room confronts the viewer with images of tribesmen hired to work as miners in what essentially look like labor camps, of overcrowded train platforms and carriages, and of other scenes of daily life below the poverty line. Later in the exhibition, a series of images grouped under the banner of “Heirs of Poverty” bears witness to the sorry state of bands of children forced to beg or pickpocket in order to survive. At the opposite end of the exhibition, the last room is dedicated to ways of resistance and to coping mechanisms devised by Black South Africans. These include the grouping “Black Ingenuity,” about forms of Black cultural expression, which Cole originally excised from House of Bondage because he felt the images too hopeful for a book meant to be an all-out castigation.

However, the most incisive pieces—the ones that linger in the viewer’s head the longest and spark the most reflection—are those that portray the far-reaching, sadistic extent of a system enshrined in myriad laws and prohibitions.

The groupings “Police & Passes” and “For Whites Only” give an account of how Black South Africans were limited in their daily movements, prohibited from entering white neighborhoods and using white services, always at the risk of being strip-searched and jailed if unable to show their ID or “passbook.” The grouping “The Cheap Servant” describes the private household as a key fault line along which racial conflict played out. Likewise, “Education For Servitude” and “Hospital Care,” in showing overcrowded classrooms and wards, portray the function of these institutions as incubators of a disposable, interchangeable labor force inculcated with belief in their own subaltern role. Finally, the extent to which Black South Africans under apartheid were deprived of control over their own bodies and made subject at all times to the arbitrariness of white supremacy and its police state is illustrated by the groupings “Black Spots” and “Banishment,” which respectively show Black towns marked for obliteration to make space for new white settlements and the living conditions of dissidents banished to remote detention camps with no notice, no trial, and no time limit. Today, parallels with the plight of Palestinians are clear.

Most of the photographs gathered here have a strong documentary thrust and, as such, work best in unison while accompanied by Cole’s illuminating writing. Quite a few, though, break this barrier and get at something that is at once more essential and less immediately tangible.

I was especially moved by the portraits of children taken in makeshift schools. They are captured while impossibly bent over their notebooks, their elbows touching, while a pearl of sweat, perhaps, trickles down their temple. Yet the determined, attentive expressions revealed in these works attest to a preternatural thirst for knowledge and freedom. Another photo depicts a tackily-dressed white woman sitting on a bench that bears the sign, “Europeans Only.” The absence on the bench’s left side, its artificial emptiness, shows us the missing limb of a body politic mangled by segregation. Nonetheless, the best photos are about sheer exhaustion. In particular, a photo of a housekeeper resting with her eyes closed and hands propping her heavy head and one of a teacher gazing blankly at her pupils convey the everyday affect of life under a system of exploitation in which life is made to feel like “a punishment for being Black.”

Photography has always interrogated its equivocal role in the representation of suffering. By laying bare the concrete structures that propped up apartheid, House of Bondage offers a poignant example of concerned photography that doesn’t merely call for pity but stirs to political action.