[Riders on a Moving Train near Johannesburg, South Africa]

Ernest Cole was a South African photographer who documented the realities of apartheid through unflinching black and white portraiture and street photography. Working primarily in the 1960s, he captured the lived experience of Black South Africans under systematic racial segregation, creating a visual archive of resistance and resilience. Cole's work is marked by its formal precision and emotional directness, refusing both sentimentality and abstraction in favor of documentary clarity. He left South Africa in 1966 and continued his practice in exile until his death in 1990.

Pretoria, South Africa