ernest cole

In February 1990, just a week following Nelson Mandela's release from prison, Ernest Cole died in poverty in New York at the age of 49. He had spent 24 years in exile from his native South Africa, and for most of his 20s and 30s had lived on the streets of New York homeless, penniless, bereft of his cameras and basically anonymous. After his death, his sister flew back to South Africa with his ashes on her lap.

The largest retrospective of his work ever mounted was finally displayed two years ago in his native land at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, built almost a century ago in an era when South Africa’s great mining fortunes were being made on the backs of black labor.

The son of a tailor and a washerwoman, Cole left school at 16 and, by passing himself off as an orphan, managed to get reclassified under apartheid rules as "colored" rather than "black". This meant he could move freely through the country without a work permit, which proved an invaluable asset when he became a photographer. In 1958, having bought a Nikon Rangefinder, he became a production assistant for the renowned Drum magazine and began a correspondence course in photography. Soon after, he began photographing everyday life under apartheid, usually at considerable risk to himself. Influenced by the photographic sensibility of Cartier-Bresson, Cole is now generally recognized as South Africa's first black freelance photographer.

In 1967, the year after he fled South Africa, Cole's first book, House of Bondage, was published to great critical acclaim. It was promptly banned in South Africa, where the images caused a political furor. Cole was also banned in South Africa; he was never allowed to return home. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, his fellow South African novelist Dan Jacobson, praised Cole's "lack of sentimentality, his tenderness, his anger, his wit". For many outside the country, Cole's photographs of life in the townships and the mines were the first glimpses of the harshness and oppression of life under apartheid in South Africa.

Check out the book "The Photographer: Photographs by Ernest Cole" published in 2010 by the Steidl/Hasselblad Foundation. Here are some of the striking and powerful images included in it.