When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted. Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book “House of Bondage,” Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. His life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck’s new film “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” narrated in Cole’s own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film opens in theaters Friday.
