
In honor of black history month, Rivertown Film Society will screen Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, a documentary chronicling the life and work of Ernest Cole, one of the first Black freelance photographers in South Africa. Cole’s pictures, shocking at the time of their first publication, revealed to the world Black life under apartheid. The screeing will take place at the Nyack Center, 58 Depew Avenue, Nyack.
This new film from Raoul Peck (Lumumba, I Am Not Your Negro) chronicles the life and work of Ernest Cole, one of the first Black free-lance news photographers in South Africa. Cole fled South Africa in 1966 and lived in exile in the U.S., where he photographed extensively in New York City as well as the American South.
Cole was fascinated by the ways this country could be at times so vastly different, and at others eerily similar, to his homeland. During this period, he published his landmark book of photographs denouncing the apartheid, House of Bondage, which, while banned in South Africa, cemented Cole’s place as one of the great photographers of his time. Cole was 27 years of age when his work gained prominence.

After his death, more than 60,000 of his 35mm film negatives were inexplicably discovered in a bank vault in Stockholm,
Sweden. Most considered these forever lost, especially the thousands of pictures Cole shot in the U.S.
Telling his own story through his writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the lens of his uncompromising work, the film is a reintroduction of a pivotal Black artist to a new generation.
Rivertown tickets are
$13 General admission
$11 Seniors and Students
$9 members of Rivertown Film
Click here to purchase tickets.
After-Film Panel
Bill Batson, Collette Fournier and Ashley Dawson will lead a discussion after the film.
Bill Batson, a writer, artist and activist. Bill is the manager and artist in residence at the Nyack Farmers Market and a Hudson Valley-based communications consultant. Batson has worked for non-profits, labor unions and elected officials. Bill serves as a Trustee of Oak Hill Cemetery, the President of Friends of Mount Moor Cemetery. and a lifetime member of the Historical Society of the Nyacks. In June 2021, Bill was inducted into the Rockland County Hall Civil Rights Hall of Fame. In 2011, Batson created the Nyack Sketch log, a series of illustrated essays and books that chronicle family and local history. Batson lived in South Africa from 1994 – 1996 and has written about the fact that many of South Africa’s most odious policies, like forced removals of non-white South Africans and artificial “homelands” were patterned on American history and law and policies like Urban Renewal.
Ashley Dawson is an advocate for political justice and community empowerment, holding a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from South Carolina State University (HBCU). Dawson is deeply involved in various advocacy groups, including Voices of Rockland, Coalition to End the New Jim Crow, and the NAACP, where she serves as Assistant Treasurer and the president of the Justice and Nurses Ministries at Pilgrim Baptist Church. As a filmmaker and co-founder of Truth 2 Power, a production company focused on bridging community, education, and film, Dawson aims to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities through storytelling. Currently, she is working on her first fiction film, That Kid, which tells the story of a young African American boy who is unfairly judged by the professionals at his school. That Kid is set in Nyack and will premiere in late February or early March.
Collette V. Fournier has an MFA in Visual Arts from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BS from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Communications and Photographic Illustration. She is the staff photography emeritus in the Campus Communications Department, and is an adjunct professor in the Photography Department at Rockland Community College since 1992. Fournier has worked as a staff photographer for The Rockland Journal-News, The Bergen Record, about…time magazine, and freelanced for The New York Post Fournier as curator served as Artist-in-Residence at the CEJJES Institute (now The Gordon Black Cultural Arts Center) in Pomona, NY for ten years has had 25 solo exhibitions and 50 group exhibitions throughout her career. . Through Atria Books/Simon & Schuster, Kamoinge published Sweet Breath of Life, A Poetic Narrative of the African American Family by Frank Stewart with writer the late Ntozake Shange. Collette participated in SASAA i(what does this stand for?) in the late 1980s, organized by Winnie Mandela and Dr. Karen Daughtry> She also photographed Mandela at NYC’s CIty Hall for the Bergen Record. in Brooklyn