Despite all of the toxic nonsense that goes on, I remain a fan of Twitter - not least because it regularly opens my eyes and ears to new things. Take, for instance, this thread - without which I may never have discovered the work of Ernest Cole.
In his pictures, South African photographer Cole not only captured inequality, poverty and destitution but also exposed the reality of apartheid in his homeland. Like the subjects of Nick Hedges' photos for Shelter, those who feature in Cole's images are shown to be suffering due to circumstances not of their own making. The horrifying, hard-to-stomach truth cannot be avoided: that white settler-colonialists quite deliberately instituted and maintained a structurally racist system that impoverished and dehumanised black people for their own selfish ends.
Which, of course, begs the question: how much has actually changed, whether in South Africa, in the US or here in the UK?
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