Cole organized House of Bondage into fifteen chapters exploring aspects of life under apartheid, including living conditions, commuting, jobs, health care, religion, and education. In the chapter “Education for Servitude,” for example, Cole included photographs of hungry students, exhausted teachers, and parents encountering bureaucratic hurdles, as well as overcrowded and underfunded schools. In his corresponding text, Cole described how the inadequate education of Black children in South Africa fit into a larger system of oppression in which they were largely limited to working as domestic and physical laborers.

Gallery label from

2023

Medium Gelatin silver print
Dimensions 25 3/16 × 17" (64 × 43.2 cm)
Credit Acquired through the generosity of Thomas and Susan Dunn
Object number 294.2019
Department Photography

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Ernest Cole

Ernest Cole

South African, 1940–1990 41 works online

For the first 26 years of my life I was one of the 13.5 million Black people who live (or should I say ‘exist’?

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