Grey Art Gallery// Ernest Cole: Photographer

Photo by NYU News

As a young Asian female living in a first world country, I belong to a privileged strata of people who have led very comfortable and sheltered lives. Ernest Cole: Photographer left an indelible reminder of this fact. His black-and-white gelatin prints capture incredibly dark subject matter - the oppression of apartheid in South Africa in the 60's, which he personally lived under.

Unique from photographers who have worked with the same subjects, Ernest Cole's work does not depict high-tension, dramatic moments of the apartheid - he chose instead to photograph the everyday interactions that he witnessed in the streets. While not in-your-face, these pictures are still in every bit politically resonating, and manage to capture the brutality of his subject's experiences while simultaneously showing how they coped with their oppression day by day.

I did find myself wishing that the pictures had been blown up in scale (perhaps at least 4-5 times their actual size) such that viewers could get a stronger understanding of the subject at hand, but I feel that the set up was decidedly small to correspond with Cole's theme of focusing on the little things that matter.