With most photographers struggling to raise capital to digitise work, those that have managed to do so have mostly used their own resources.
When I was at UCT Libraries, we went into an ambitious mode of digitising as many private photo collections as we could. That happened until I left in 2018. since then and have been working with a number of archives and photographers around South Africa: this includes Ernest Cole’s archive, Peter Magubane, Alf Kumalo and Ruth Motau among others and also outside South Africa, with archives in Kenya, Sudan and Lesotho.
The other related issue, particularly around vernacular photography, is that people from outside come and buy the collections and we lose them on a regular basis to the first world and wealthier countries, which buy up our heritage. Very little is done to preserve what we understand as vernacular photography.
Consisting of a vast photographic record of Cape Flats history, from the 1960s onwards, as well as an equally vast documentation of the history of jazz in South Africa, the Rashid Lombard Collection brings into view a hitherto repressed and often neglected feature of life under apartheid. The Rashid Lombard Collection may help to expand the standard national narrative of the struggle against apartheid by drawing attention to the cultural politics and everyday life that enabled millions of people to negotiate the landscapes of racial segregation in a divided city.
The Lombard collection represents an act of renewal, both at the levels of the archival commitments of UWC and in the efforts to relink sense and perception in the divided city.
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