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‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’ Review: Raoul Peck’s Documentary Rediscovers the Fearless Photographer of South African Apartheid
Raoul Peck's documentary rediscovers Ernest Cole, who showed the world what apartheid looked like. But after moving to New York he became a ghost.
But it, too, is the penetrating portrait of a Black artist — the photographer Ernest Cole, who was born in 1940 in Eersterust, South Africa, and who beginning in the late ’50s took his camera into the streets to chronicle the evils and everyday experience of life under apartheid. We see the South African version of Jim Crow, featuring signs — on entranceways, drinking fountains — that say “Europeans only,” and it’s a shock to register this variation on our own diabolical system of segregation. “And sometimes the monster looks back at me.” Cole captured the lives of servants who were paid $15 a month, and the misery of life in the diamond, platinum, iron, and gold mines that were the source of South Africa’s wealth (and the bulwark of the regime’s power).
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