Belonging and freedom in Ernest Cole’s The House of Bondage

Abstract Ernest Cole’s seminal photo essay, House of Bondage (1966), locates freedom in the documentarian’s creative effort, which aims to bring forth the fullness of African lives under oppression. This essay explores the paradox of Cole’s experience of a loss of creative freedom in exile compared to his experience in South Africa. A wounded belonging inspires his perspective on space and context and his articulation of an African-centered ethical perspective. To convey the fullness of life, Cole exploits the tensions between text and image that characterize the photo essay form, setting up his images so that they exceed the conventional function of documentary. The result is a novelistic work that aims, in Georg Lukács’s terms “to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.” Cole’s images of subjects reading convey their yearning for freedom by depicting them in a state of thought that indicates imaginative engagement with the world beyond their confinement. Images of persons reading, furthermore, belong to a pictorial convention strongly associated with the establishment of the novel as a popular literary form in the nineteenth century, when the novels similarly conveyed the space of interiority as freedom.