House of Bondage (First UK Edition)
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 around the domination of one group of human beings by another.
The book was published in New York in 1967 and banned in South Africa before its pages had time to reach the country they depicted. The British edition, published by Allen Lane the following year, is considerably scarcer than its American counterpart, and the two together mark one of the defining moments in the history of the photobook as a vehicle for political witness.
Near fine in a near fine unclipped dust jacket. Some very mild toning to the dust jacket inner edges and to the edges of the volume. Binding well preserved with spine gilt bright. Contents fresh, bright, and free from markings.
This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000331
Original: $160.49
-65%$160.49
$56.17
Description
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 around the domination of one group of human beings by another.
The book was published in New York in 1967 and banned in South Africa before its pages had time to reach the country they depicted. The British edition, published by Allen Lane the following year, is considerably scarcer than its American counterpart, and the two together mark one of the defining moments in the history of the photobook as a vehicle for political witness.
Near fine in a near fine unclipped dust jacket. Some very mild toning to the dust jacket inner edges and to the edges of the volume. Binding well preserved with spine gilt bright. Contents fresh, bright, and free from markings.
This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]
Catalogue Number: HH000331
