Amsterdam’s FOAM museum hosts the first exhibition of the artist’s lost archive, rediscovered in a bank vault in 2018.
In 1966, Ernest Cole fled his native South Africa, never to return. The nation’s first Black freelance photographer, he carried with him a secret cache of images documenting the evils of apartheid—photos he knew that could never be published in the county of his birth.
Instead, he went to New York City, where Magnum Photos and Random House published his House of Bondage, exposing South Africa’s horrific apartheid system to the world. The groundbreaking book became international news, helping fuel the anti-apartheid movement.