Ernest Cole’s life was defined by exile. In 1966, the photographer landed in New York from South Africa. He was still fresh-faced at 26, but he wasn’t in America by choice. Earlier that year, the authorities had arrested Cole for documenting Black life under the country’s hellish system of apartheid. By the time he’d landed in the home of the free, he was on his native country’s “banned list.” Cole moved between New York, Ohio, California, Tennessee, Mississippi, and South Carolina. With travel came disillusionment. He documented the months before the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as the aftermath. Though he’d come to America to make his fortune, life as a Black man didn’t feel much easier on this side of the Atlantic. By the 1970s, Cole was disheartened and his creative output slowed to a trickle. In 1975, when fellow photographer Shawn Walker spotted him in Penn Station, he was on a bench, his home a miserable patch of plastic bags. Cole insisted that “living here at the station is in no way as bad as living in the shantytowns in South Africa.” He died from pancreatic cancer in 1990, age 49. This film reintroduces the largely forgotten yet extraordinary artist. —Elena Clavarino