Raoul Peck, the Haitian film-maker and political activist, was a teenager when he first encountered the trailblazing work of the black South African photographer Ernest Cole.
“I was in Berlin, studying,” says Peck, whose family had fled the regime of François Duvalier. “I was around 17. It was a time of fighting for anybody coming from the third world. There was a dictatorship in Haiti. I was working on my diploma so that I could go back home and fight.
“My friends from South Africa were doing the same. My friends from Brazil were doing the same. My friends from Germany were themselves fighting, confronting their fathers and grandfathers.
“We were all very politicised. Ernest Cole’s photographs were used in our propaganda. Those were the first photos that told the story from the inside of the apartheid beast.
“At the time it was not about the artist behind the images; we were not yet in this self-centred, egomaniac world. Our thoughts were: how can we use these images effectively? How can we politicise the situation? How can we mobilise public opinion?”
The photographer, who is the subject of Peck’s new film, Ernest Cole: Lost & Found, was born in 1940 to a black family living outside Pretoria. He left school when the segregationist Bantu Education Act came into effect, completing his studies through a correspondence course.
Cole began his career assisting Jürgen Schadeberg, a German-born picture editor, at Drum, a South African magazine aimed at black readers. He later provoked officials with searing images of street life as chief photographer at the weekly newspaper Bantu World.
Black people were barred from travelling around South Africa. Cole managed to do so by changing the spelling of his surname from Kole and straightening his hair, to pass as “coloured”. This comparatively freeing designation enabled him to document the cruelty of life under apartheid through the photographs that became House of Bondage, his groundbreaking collection from 1967.
Its images of the appalling treatment of black people saw Cole exiled and stripped of his citizenship. Taking refuge first in Sweden and then in the United States, he worked for the Magnum Photos agency and received funding from Time-Life before fading into obscurity. He died in poverty in New York in 1990.
“I followed the whole anti-apartheid fight until the freedom of Mandela,” Peck says. “I knew people like Ernest Cole and I also know what it means to be in exile, far away from your home country, your birth country, and not being able to do anything. You still have the news. Every day somebody is arrested, somebody is killed. There is real terror in Haiti right now; the capital is surrounded by gangs.
”I talk almost every night with my friends. We are strategising. We are trying to find answers. For Ernest it was even worse. He was in the US when there were not a lot of South Africans, because to leave South Africa you had to have an authorisation that was not given easily. He was there when black Americans were isolated. In the cultural world, even a well-known musician could not enter through the front entrance in the 1960s. So Ernest was totally isolated.”
In its brief obituary of Cole, the New York Times pointed out that, for many westerners, House of Bondage was “their first sight of what life was like for blacks in the South African mines, compounds and townships”. He never published another collection. His negatives were assumed lost until his nephew Leslie Matlaisane was contacted by a bank in Sweden, where 60,000 negatives were retrieved from three safety deposit boxes.
“If you don’t have the total co-operation of the estate or the right holders, it’s impossible to make a film like this one,” Peck says. “We bonded very quickly and worked together for two years, getting all the negatives back. At the time I was not sure I wanted to make a film, but I know the value of archive. I know the value of memories. I know the value of an artist’s work.”
Peck’s carefully constructed biography charts a hitherto unknown second act for Cole. The negatives include decades of images from the United States. Unsurprisingly, the photographer found a continuum between the systemic racism of his homeland and that of his adopted country.
“It tells you a lot about the human condition,” Peck says. “This is what interests him. How do people live? What conditions are they living in?
“He says at the beginning of our film that he didn’t want to become a chronicler of misery and injustice. But, knowing the US in the 1960s, you can understand that he lived in a very controlled world. Even black American photographers and women artists had no recognition in the world until the 2000s.
“That was one of the most frustrating things for him. People would try to put him in a box and contain him, contain his ambition, contain his artistic goals.”
Peck’s Oscar-nominated documentary portrait of James Baldwin from 2016, I Am Not Your Negro, was voiced by Samuel L Jackson. Ernest Cole: Lost & Found finds an affecting first-person narrator in LaKeith Stanfield, another Oscar-nominated actor.
“It’s a story told from the inside, and only an actor can provide that quality and sensitivity,” says the director. “And, you know, those are great actors.”
Peck has been politically active since his youth. As a film-maker he has made both an imaginative documentary and a narrative feature inspired by the life and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 2005, Peck directed Idris Elba in Sometimes in April, a film set during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. With The Young Karl Marx he crafted one of the great movie bromances in its portrayal of Marx’s relationship with his fellow political theorist Friedrich Engels. His 2021 miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes, is a wide-ranging exploration of colonisation and genocide.
“Film is my way to make politics,” Peck says. “But I have to have a connection with the material. I’ve lived in many different countries. I have had the opportunity to see reality from different points of view. I use all that. I’m not into propaganda. I’m interested in humanity.
“With Karl Marx it was about making him a human being, not some sort of a statue. His correspondence is lively and funny and ironic. The film is the story of three young Europeans who decided to change the world. That connection is important for me. I’m not here to lecture anybody, I want you to feel the people I depict, and then you make your own decision. I’m just giving you the tools.”
Peck was Haiti’s minister for culture in 1996-97. Having documented abuses of power and political injustice throughout his career, he compares the experience to being in a laboratory.
“I knew most of it, but it was a crash course in seeing how human beings function in a power structure and the relationship between elected officials and the public and institutions,” he says.
“I see exactly what’s going on in Trump’s country right now, and the destruction wrought by people who were never in government, because I know how much it takes to create a little programme to help young women or kids or people with Aids.
“It takes at least three or four years to find the money and the infrastructure. And then that gets destroyed in one minute by someone with no training.”
Ernest Cole: Lost & Found is in cinemas from Monday, March 3rd
