Aperture x FOAM: Celebrating the Legacy of Ernest Cole

Join Aperture and FOAM for an online conversation with Hinde Haest, Leslie Matlaisane, Denise Wolff, and Oluremi Onabanjo to celebrate Ernest Cole’s enduring legacy and photographic work. 

During the evening, the guest speakers will share their insights and reflections on Cole’s life’s work, which captured the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa and exposed the dehumanizing effects of racial oppression in the daily life of Black South Africans. Cole’s photographs are now considered a historical reference and a powerful testament to the resilience of those who fought for justice and equality. 

This program is presented in partnership with FOAM. Advance registration is required. Please register here.

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Hinde Haest is a curator at FOAM, where she has worked on exhibitions including Masahisa Fukase: Private Scenes and William Eggleston: Los Alamos. She previously worked on photography exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum, Huis Marseille, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Barbican Art Gallery. She received the Manfred and Hanna Heiting Fellowship in 2013 and was a research fellow at the New Museum in 2015. She has authored books on the photography collections of the Rijksmuseum and the Nederlands Fotomuseum, and has contributed to magazines such as Aperture, Metropolis M, and FOAM magazine. She holds an MS from SOAS University of London and an MA from University College London.

Leslie Matlaisane is trustee of the Ernest Cole Family Trust, responsible for preserving and promoting Ernest Cole’s body of work and legacy. He has also worked as a finance accountant and finance manager for the Get Ahead Foundation, tasked with financial reporting and portfolio quality reports. He co-founded Grand Finance, a retail lending institution, and later served as finance director for both Blue Dot Finance and Vengrow Capital. Aside from his work with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, Matlaisane is currently an external project manager for the South African Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA).

Denise Wolff is senior editor of the Aperture book program, where she focuses on commissioning and editing books for a broad audience, including The Open Road: Photography and the American Road Trip by David Campany (2014), Girl Pictures by Justine Kurland (2020), and House of Bondage by Ernest Cole (2022). In addition, Denise spearheads the Photography Workshop Series, featuring titles by Dawoud Bey, Larry Fink, Todd Hido, Mary Ellen Mark, Richard Misrach, and Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. Her projects have won numerous AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers and D&AD Awards, as well as an Alice Award and the Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Exhibition Competition. She is currently an adjunct professor at Fordham University, New York.

Oluremi Onabanjo is associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the department of photography. She lectures internationally on photography and curatorial practice, and her writing appears in Aperture, the New Yorker, The PhotoBook Review, and Tate Etc., as well as publications by the Art Institute of Chicago, the RISD Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Onabanjo is the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards. She is the 2022 recipient of the Cisneros Institute Research Grant, and is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University. She holds degrees in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University and African Studies from Columbia University. 

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Image: Ernest Cole, Whistle has sounded, train is moving, but people are still trying to get on, South Africa, ca. 1960s; House of Bondage (Aperture, 2022) © Ernest Cole Family Trust

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