Ernest Cole was born in Eersterust, Pretoria, in 1940, before apartheid affected Black lives in South Africa. Cole started taking photographs when he was eight, after a Roman Catholic priest gave him a camera as a present. That same year apartheid took effect. At 13, Cole left school and completed his diploma through a correspondence course with Wolsey Hall in Oxford. At 18, he scored an assistant role at Drum magazine, a weekly covering Black lifestyle; Jurgen Schadeberg, head of the photo department, took him on as an assistant. Soon Cole was jumping between media jobs, mingling with Black creatives and recording the catastrophic effects of apartheid day to day. He fled for New York in 1966, after tricking the authorities into classifying him as “colored” instead of “Black.” Cole died of cancer at age 49, in 1989, but five years ago a huge cache of Cole negatives and contact sheets were discovered in a Swedish bank. Images from these archives are on view in this exhibition, alongside a selection of Cole’s seminal photographs. —Elena Clavarino