Ernest Cole, photographer of apartheid

In the introduction to his only book, “House of Bondage” (1967), South African photographer Ernest Cole, who would soon be forced into exile, wrote, “You may escape but you carry your prison smell with you.” His powerful images and the tragic ending of his life 22 years later open a window on how blacks lived under the apartheid regime. Now some of those images — 100 rare prints from Cole’s archive at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden — will be on display for the public at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery from Sept. 3 through Dec. 6.

If the photographs have preserved their emotional impact, it is in large part because they were taken from the inside, as a black man in Pretoria, Soweto, Johannesburg and elsewhere in South Africa in the late 1950s and early ’60s. One of the first black photojournalists in the country, Cole knew the lives he was depicting intimately because it was his life too. He understood and had access to the people and places he photographed. Working unobtrusively, without a flash, he would occasionally hide his camera under a sandwich and an apple in a brown paper bag with a hole when he went to mines and nonwhites’ hospitals; he even had himself arrested so he could photograph prisoners in several jails. One photograph he took at Soweto’s Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital shows a woman covered by a gray blanket in a makeshift bed constructed from four chairs. In another, a man is arrested for being in a white area illegally. In a third, some men depart from jail, under guard.

It is his own world that Cole presents with rigor, subtlety and elegance and with no pretense of objectivity. The photographs are political, but they do not illustrate political ideas. Instead, they are faithful to the complexities of life and show both miserable and happy moments — homeless boys sleeping in a park at dawn, homes being razed as residents stand dazed with nowhere to go, naked children on a lawn playing with a water hose, children jumping rope in Mamelodi, where Cole lived with his mother.

He was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940 in a black township on the edge of Pretoria, the fourth of six children, into a family of modest means. His father worked as a tailor and his mother as a laundress. A loner, Ernest was a curious child. His fascination with photography began when he was quite young, when a Roman Catholic priest he knew from attending Mass — Cole was very religious — gave him a camera. “I couldn’t get over it,” Cole says in “The Photographer,” a 2010 collection of his work. “[For] the first few days I carried it around with me wherever I went — even to school. I went around taking snapshots of school friends, beer parties, babies, and I made quite a bit of money.” When a friend gave him a catalog from a photography correspondence school, he realized that he could take up photography as a profession. He practiced for hours getting the camera up to his eye fast, shooting and then dropping it back under his jacket. In “The Photographer,” Cole’s friend Ivor Powell, whom he met in 1961, described him as “a slight small youngster with an enormous rosary … [and] possessed of a giant’s will.”