Ernest Cole (1940-1990) was born as Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole, in Eersterust, Pretoria. He joined the DRUM group of journalists, and thereafter started working as a freelance photographer. In 1966 he eventually decided to leave South Africa, as his work and movements became increasingly restricted by Apartheid laws. He managed to take with him a body of work which he had collected, including his negatives, which he used for the book "House of Bondage", published in New York in 1967, and one year later in London. He continued living and working in the USA, where he received a grant from the Ford Foundation to support a photographic project mainly on Afro-American issues and race relations in the USA. He also travel and lived in Sweden. He died from cancer in a hospital in New York in 1990.