Ernest Cole: Lost and Found review – a vital piece of cine-portraiture

Filmmaker Raoul Peck unearths the searing social realist photographs of an artist whose work was thought to be lost.

The ideal of urban flaneur is turned on its head in Raoul Peck’s headstrong portrait of photographer Ernest Cole, who left his homeland of South Africa in 1966 for New York City, bringing with him a radical photographic exposition of the South African Apartheid regime.
Lost and Found continues in the vein of Peck’s lauded 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, which portrays the incomplete writings of the Black American writer James Baldwin, a notorious voice in the American Civil Rights movement.

Lost and Found functions as a candid observation of the artist’s isolation as an exile in the US, represented by his vast catalogue of social-realist photography, which captured the impact of international law on the domestic everyday of the black immigrant American. In a period defined by the Warholian experimentation of the art world, Cole’s story counters these ideals with him representing the struggle of the diasporic visionary; a life and legacy plagued by despondency, repression and financial struggle. The film weaves a strong narrative thread through its careful selection of archive photo-catalogue, paired with Lakeith Stanfield’s evocative voice-over whose dialogue is drawn from Cole’s personal diaries and notes. As such, we are exposed to the photographer’s internal dialogue as he explores a New York rife with iniquity, poverty, racism, yet the occasional hard-earned joy. In its strongest moments, the film is paced with real tempo – a sense of sophisticated motion that runs in tandem with its subject matter of the concrete, bustling, yet fluid cityscape. However, at points the use of overtly glossy, digital animation becomes a distraction from the nostalgically textured world of the analogue.

Commenting on his once-criminalised photojournal ‘House of Bondage’, Ernest Cole recollects; ‘It was more than just a political pamphlet… it was not conceived as a anti-apartheid crusade, it was about my life and the life of millions of others.’. At its core the documentary is effectively centred around this ethos. There’s a certain capacity of cinema as a medium to engage with the multi-sensory, and Lost and Found succeeds in this by conjuring a political resonance for the contemporary viewer through a dedicated consideration of score, archive footage, global newsreels, and by structuring a vast photographic archive through each passing chapter, trial and decade.

Emerging into present day, we meet the solitary ‘talking head’ of the film, the nephew, who was informed in 2017 that 60,000 of his uncle’s lost negatives were inexplicably discovered in a Swedish bank. However, alongside the glossy production aesthetic, this moment comes across as more of a contrived dramatic peak rather than something which hones in the focus on Cole’s images, detracting from the film’s otherwise confident and contemplative style.

There’s a danger, too, that the narrative becomes slightly too reiterative to justify its runtime, and lacks a sense of final transgression. And yet, there are many valuable questions at play: What consequence does the disparate nature of the archive have?; How do the lives of our diasporic artists continue to be communicated in the public sphere? Perhaps, the intention here is to understand the irretrievable cultural tragedy of the overlooked individual. Ultimately, the lasting message of Lost and Found is discovered in the heart of its subject’s work, and the undeniable power of his uncompromising camera lens – frames transformed into cinema, an abrasive reckoning with the edifice of the past.

Published 7 Mar 2025

Tags: Black History James Baldwin Raoul Peck