When Ernest Cole decided to publish a book of his photographs documenting the lives of black South Africans under apartheid, he knew that he would have to leave his home country. “I didn’t care,” he later said. Things were bad enough. Simply to pursue his career as a freelance photographer, he’d had to alter his surname of Kole and be reclassified from “black” to “coloured” – this meant he didn’t have to carry a passbook, which would have severely restricted his movement.

It also allowed him a passport. So in 1966, aged 26, he got out and settled in New York; to secure his exit visa he claimed he was taking a pilgrimage to Lourdes. A year later House of Bondage was published. This was the first comprehensive account of the realities of apartheid to be circulated outside South Africa – where, as Cole predicted, both he and the book were summarily banned. He never returned before dying, in 1990, from pancreatic cancer.

The photobook, long out of print, was reissued in 2022 by Aperture and is now the basis of an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. (There is also a concurrent show of Cole’s later work, shot in the United States, at Autograph ABP in Shoreditch.) More than 50 years on, Cole’s images of apartheid – all black and white – have lost none of their unsettling power. It’s only a shame there isn’t room to show all of them.