House of Bondage (First UK Edition)

A$300 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

COLE, Ernest (photographs); text with Thomas Flaherty; introduction by Joseph Lelyveld. House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today. London: A Ridge Press Book / Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968. Quarto. Original publisher's cloth. Spine gilt. Pictorial dust jacket. 187, [5] pp., illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs. First UK edition (first published in the United States by Ridge Press / Random House, 1967; immediately banned in South Africa). Parr Badger, The Photobook , Vol. II, pp. 106–107. Ernest Cole was twenty-six years old when he left South Africa in 1966, his negatives smuggled out of the country in secret. What those negatives contained was a systematic and devastating visual record of apartheid as it was lived from the inside: as it was experienced by the Black majority who lived under it. Cole was South Africa's first Black freelance photojournalist, and to carry out his self-imposed assignment he had arranged to have himself officially reclassified as 'coloured' rather than 'Black', gaining a half-degree of additional freedom of movement that allowed him to photograph what other photographers could not reach. The result was House of Bondage : one hundred and eighty-seven pages of images that showed, with the force of irrefutable testimony, the mines and the schools, the hospitals and the pass courts, the compounds and the streets of a society organised entirely aroun

• Binding: Hardcover

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