Ernest Levi Tsoloane Cole (1940–1990) was born in Eersterust, on the eastern edges of Pretoria, South Africa. As a teenager, following the introduction of the racist Bantu Education policy, he dropped out of school and took up studying by correspondence. After signing up for a course with the New York Institute of Photography, he began his photography career. Some of his earliest photographs appeared in Zonk magazine. Soon after, he was offered a position as a darkroom assistant at Drum magazine, under the tutelage of Jürgen Schadeberg.

After two years at Drum, he became a freelance photographer, placing his work with local South African publications such as Bantu World, Drum, Rand Daily Mail, Sunday Express, and Zonk. Cole’s more political work also made it into the international media, most notably the New York Times.

Cole left South Africa in 1966, smuggling out many of his negatives, which were later published in his seminal photobook, House of Bondage. He was associated with Magnum Photos and spent an extensive time in Sweden, becoming involved with the well-known Tiofoto photography collective.

Cole is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the 1960s and 70s. His life was, however, far from uncomplicated. He spent many years in America suffering from homesickness and depression. Cole died of cancer in a public hospital in New York in 1990, one week after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

In 2017, more than sixty thousand of his negatives — missing for more than forty years — resurfaced in Sweden. In 2022, House of Bondage was reissued by Aperture, followed by The True America, featuring never-before-seen images of the United States, published in 2023. A documentary on his life and the controversies surrounding his archive, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, was recently produced by the Haitian filmmaker and director Raoul Peck.