ERNEST COLE: LOST AND FOUND - Mark Reviews Movies

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

Ernest Cole became a man without a home after clearly illuminating the systematic injustices of his homeland to the world. His official designation was "stateless," even though Cole was born in South Africa and was a citizen of that country until a certain point. In a way, he tried to live up to that description, as he traveled the world and found a career taking photographs for various publications and projects. The story of the life depicted in Ernest Cole: Lost and Found isn't nearly as romantic as that might make it sound, though.

Cole's life is a tragedy in director Raoul Peck's documentary, which uses the man's own photographs to show the importance of his work and his own words to explain why the work wasn't enough for him. There was the practical matter that being a freelance photographer, living in places foreign to him, wasn't going to pay the bills, if Cole had any bills to pay beyond rent at various boarding houses. More to the point, though, there was no number of pictures that Cole could take that would fill the voids of being exiled from his home and seeing injustice almost anywhere he went.

The man sure did seem to try to fill those voids, however, because Peck's film opens with the surprise discovery in 2017 of about 60,000 photo negatives that once belonged to Cole, who died at the age of 49 in 1990. Cole's photographic legacy was already extensive, starting and, in some ways, ending with his 1967 book House of Bondage, which published a collection of photos of South Africa under the government policy of apartheid.

High-profile demonstrations that resulted in the killings of protestors by government forces brought the world's attention to the inevitable violence of such an unjust system. Cole's book, though, showed that the injustice and violence were everyday occurrences—to be found on every sign separating European citizens from native "non-white" ones, on the faces of Black nannies who raised children they knew would grow up to hate them, and in random checks of Black citizens' papers.

Examples of those photos are presented here, often without any commentary—because they do not require it to see what's happening and to feel the constant state of indignity on display. Cole's talent for and skill in capturing these moments are obvious, but some of the photographer's thoughts on his technique are fascinating. He wasn't thinking about composition or anything one might expect to hear about from a professional photographer. No, Cole just had to get used to looking at eye level and to get a shot as he hurried down the street before anyone noticed what he was doing.

The book was a success. It made a name for Cole, which was to the benefit of his blossoming career but to the detriment of other parts of his life. House of Bondage was banned in South Africa, and Cole, who had left for New York City with his photos, was no longer welcome in his own country. He didn't feel especially welcome there to begin with, of course, but this was a different matter entirely. He wouldn't see his mother again for more than two decades, and the circumstances of their reunion would be one, final piece of the tragic story of their relationship.

How did the man endure all of this? Peck, using Cole's own writings and archival footage and some speculative first-person narration, gives us a sense of how he did. In many ways, he didn't, and if the moments of doubt and despair and homesickness in that narration isn't fully communicated by the words, actor LaKeith Stanfield's vocal performance as both Cole and an omniscient narrator puts the final finish on those sentiments.

The story here comes in flashes of ideas, driven by Cole's travels and his photos across the United States, as he finds racial injustice equal to that of his home country and finds it difficult to comprehend how that's possible (He explains that in South Africa he worried about being arrested, but in the Deep South of the United States, he feared of being shot). There are good moments for the man, as he does find opportunities for work, grant money for projects, some companionship in Sweden, and encounters with people he otherwise wouldn't have met. On the balance, though, Cole comes across as someone who saw the world and other people too well to find much comfort in those moments.

There's the mystery of the origin of those photos, obviously, and how long, as well as why, they were hidden away in a bank vault in Stockholm, but it's mostly an excuse to show us these previously lost photos, now in the care of a family trust established in Cole's name. The photographer's nephew Leslie Matlaisane, one of the trustees, explains the weird process of recovering the negatives, but his account of the little he knew of his uncle's life is probably more enlightening.

At a certain point in the narrative, Cole's life does become more difficult to track, because he stopped taking pictures, began living out of a train station, and watched as other exiles from South Africa had similar difficulties adjusting to their own stateless status. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found becomes more than a biography of its subject, because it's as much about his inner life and how he saw the world as it is about events and his work.

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