‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’ Review: A Scattered Portrait of a Great Photographer

In 1967, Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage, a photobook examining life under apartheid in South Africa, was published. Fifty years later, 60,000 of Cole’s unknown negatives were uncovered, including photographs from his years as an exile in New York City. Much happened in those intervening years, both in South Africa and in Cole’s life, and Raoul Peck’s Ernest Cole: Lost and Found focuses primarily on filling in the blanks in that stretch of history.

The documentary divides its attention between exploring South Africa’s social and political unrest under apartheid and the reverberations of its eventual abnegation, examining many of Cole’s newly discovered photographs, and detailing the man’s life from the late ’60s until his untimely death in 1990 from cancer. It’s a lot to cover in under two hours, and Peck never quite finds an effective way of weaving the disparate threads together, leaving the film feeling more than a bit shapeless, especially when it eschews chronology for no discernible reason.

But despite Lost and Found’s loose structure, and the meandering that, at times, comes as a result of it, the film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid. Using both Cole’s photographs and his words, Peck captures a vast range of experiences, from rebellion and resistance to cultural assimilation. And while Nelson Mandela gets a brief mention, Peck, like Cole, keeps his attention to the everyday people and their struggles, delving into everything from their grueling work in gold mines to the lasting effects of the Native Administration Act of 1927, which allowed the South African government to forcibly relocate any Black African or entire tribes from South Africa without notice.

Because of this, one gets a more personal sense of people’s struggle during apartheid than is typically found in documentaries about that era. Cole’s anger is palpable in archival footage of him, but so is his empathy and curiosity, which is also evident in his photographs of America in the 1970s and ’80s. Photos of Black people in both New York City and in the South, the latter of which he visited throughout the late ’60s, again speak to vastly different experiences—both joy and suffering, persistence and exhaustion. And Peck focuses equally on both extremes.

Peck makes a note of stressing Cole’s discomfort in the South, with the photographer at one point even confessing that he felt less safe there than in South Africa. But while Lost and Found regards Cole’s life and work, as well as the trials and tribulations of Black South Africans, with an informed and compassionate curiosity, it leaves one wanting for more of a thematic through line between its portrait of Cole’s life in South Africa and his life in the United States.