The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square’s mirages—brilliant expanses of neon fantasies, some spanning the length of several stories and the breadth of entire city blocks—summon passers-by with images of athletes, models, slick […]
Information on famed South African photographer Ernest Cole’s decision to ‘pass’ from ‘African’ to ‘coloured’ in Apartheid South Africa’s kafkaesque “race classification system” is not readily available beyond the ready-made theories and rationalizations repeated in museum catalogues or on websites.
The South African photographer Ernest Cole is largely forgotten now. But in 1967 the publication of his “House of Bondage”–his mostly clandestine photographs of the workings and effects of Apartheid–by a New York publisher had major repercussions inside and outside the country. Cole had left South Africa the year before with only the negatives. The […]
