VIEWFINDING #27
Ernest Cole / The Camera Never Lies / Homer Sykes
Ernest Cole: House of Bondage
South African photographer Ernest Cole is without doubt one of the most important documenters of the country’s apartheid system, and his landmark House of Bondage series is now showing at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Fleeing South Africa’s racist regime in 1966, Cole headed to New York, smuggling his photographs out with him. First published in 1967, House of Bondage is a graphic account of the inequality and brutality faced by the Black population in apartheid South Africa, something that its country’s government went to great lengths to conceal from the international media. Cole’s images revealed the injustices suffered by Black South Africans in day-to-day life, and House of Bondage became one of the most important photobooks of the twentieth century.
The exhibition features over 100 prints, presented in 15 themed chapters, as per the Cole’s book, and includes works from a chapter titled Black Ingenuity that was not published in the original edition of the book, only in later editions.
‘It is an extraordinary experience to live as though life were a punishment for being Black.’ Ernest Cole
Ernest Cole: House of Bondage is at London’s The Photographer’s Gallery until 22nd September, more details here.
All images © estate of Ernest Cole / Magnum Photos, courtesy of The Photographer’s Gallery
The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project
In a world awash with media manipulation and disinformation, The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project is a timely exhibition looking at how the narratives of important global events can be distorted to meet particular agendas.
This new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich features over 100 prints from The Incite Project, a private collection of photojournalism and documentary photography that has a remit to support contemporary practitioners.
The show includes work by Robert Capa, Stuart Franklin, Dorothea Lange, Don McCullin, and Richard Mosse, and is presented in two parts. The first looks at how single images have come to define events, both at the time and later, historically, while the second examines the increased control available to image-makers in recent years through access to technology.
In the words of curators Harriet Logan and Tristan Lund, ‘Sometimes seen as superior to text, photographs are now a mainstay of how the media and the public consume events such as war, famine, and celebrity. But is what people see a true reflection of the reality?’
The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project is showing at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich until 20th October. Further information can be found here.
First image © Anastasia Taylor-Lind, second image © Stuart Franklin, courtesy of Magnum Photos, third image © Richard Mosse. All courtesy of The Incite Project / Sainsbury Centre.
Homer Sykes: An Annual Affair – Some Traditional British Calendar Customs
Friend-of-the-gallery, and chronicler of the British at work and play, Homer Sykes is running a Kickstarter fundraiser to publish his new photobook, An Annual Affair: Some Traditional British Calendar Customs.
A culmination of 15 years’ work researching and documenting traditional British events and ceremonies, this project is a continuation from Sykes’ Once A Year, Some Traditional British Customs, first published in 1977, and republished by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2017. The new book will feature 140 colour images from 80 different events, with only three of these events appearing in the monochrome 1977 book. An Annual Affair will also be published by Dewi Lewis.
As is usual with Kickstarter projects, there are various reward levels that correspond to different amounts pledged. Rewards offered include signed books, signed books with prints, and even a day with Homer looking through his photobook collection and vintage print archive. The pledger of that ultimate level also gets to choose a bromide print – or prints plural, depending on the amount pledged – to take home. Not a deal to be sniffed at, as a £1,000 pledge allows you to choose from prints that usually retail at £2,000. There is only one rule that applies to the spending-time-with-Homer reward, which is that he’s very happy to, ‘talk photography, but not cameras’. Quite right too.
Homer Sykes has published 16 books, and his work has featured in many magazines around the world. He has been widely exhibited, his first show being at London’s ICA in 1971, and was the first British photographer to be given a solo exhibition at the Maison Robert Doisneau museum in Paris.
If you would like to support Homer’s project, then don’t delay, as the Kickstarter expires in the early hours of tomorrow (Saturday, 15th June). There are more details here, including a video of Homer discussing the project.
Images © Homer Sykes
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