Cole was a black South African photographer whose work illuminated the reality of life under apartheid, but Raoul Peck’s excellent documentary unearths a life of exile and homesicknessHaitian film-maker Raoul Peck won an Oscar nomination for his 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin, whose writings were voiced by Samuel L Jackson; now he takes a comparable approach to a more elusive and in some ways more complex subject. This is the black South African photographer Ernest Cole whose fierce pictures of life under apartheid brought this political reality home to the US and the west, and played a real part in the pressure brought to bear on the South African government. But it was Cole’s terrible destiny to live as a stateless exile, mostly in the US, finally dying penniless in 1990 just as Nelson Mandela was being released.Cole died of pancreatic cancer, but it’s not too fanciful to say that he also died of depression and simple homesickness, anguished by his alienation from a homeland for which he felt a wrenchingly passionate yearning. In the US, where his photo collection House of Bondage was published, he found that his public and grant-giving bodies wanted more of the same from him: more images of racism. But Cole wanted to escape the prison house of racial identity, and so resisted obvious agitprop work; yet he also irritated his sponsors by claiming that racism was just as bad in the US. Meanwhile, anti-apartheid activists left behind in South Africa felt that he had left the struggle’s frontline for a pampered American life of artistic celebrity. Continue reading...