Rashid Lombard, the photojournalist and jazz impresario died on June 4 2025 at the age of 74. Diminutive in stature, he was a Grootman in the spheres of cultural activism, documentary photography, music and eventing.
Lombard was of a generation that fought apartheid during the bloody 1970s and 1980s with all of themselves: their art, ideas, actions and words. Significant also, was a refusal to be deprived of their humanity by making every breath an act of resistance against a racist and bloodthirsty state.
By living life to the fullest — whether at the barricades, funerals and mass rallies during the 1980s states of emergency, or in the jazz haunts where musicians like Robbie Jansen and Basil “Manenberg” Coetzee breathed life into the latter’s proclamation that “my sax is my gun” — Lombard and photographer contemporaries like Rafs Mayet and the late Peter Mckenzie sought to make some sense of the world through their lenses, the music they loved, and the social justice they felt compelled to fight for.
In a 2022 interview with Lombard, he described that period to me as “the turbulent 80s” and said, “Many will tell you that whether listening, dancing or playing music, such moments were for the most part during those times, [firstly], personal retreats and spaces and, secondly, shared moments of joy and celebration ... of sadness and commiseration — like shared prayers sometimes. Food for the spirit and the soul that took the pain away.”
He was a hip cat, as much as he was hard livings. The founder of the Cape Town International Jazz Festival in 2000, Lombard smaaked a dop, and a skyf. After each night’s official programme musicians would gather for legendary jam session after-parties at the festival hotel, and Lombard would be one of the last to leave in the early mornings. Yet, he would also be one of the first on-site the very next day, whether to pop into the arts-journalism programme run by Gwen Ansell or to personally check in on the comfort of newly arrived musicians.
With the jazz festival, Lombard raised the standards in quality live music production to unprecedented new heights in SA and set a benchmark for how musicians should be treated: with respect and care, because they were the centre pieces of performance.
In a social media post, the award-winning drummer Kesivan Naidoo described the festival as “the first time we were seen. Heard. Validated. He changed the course of our lives with that gift.”
Lombard’s knowledge of music was encyclopedic, his excitement for it boundless — and he had a hustler’s charm. These combined to ensure he could bring legends like saxophonist Wayne Shorter to SA.
The musicians adored him. As did young journalists and photographers. Lombard always had a word of advice or encouragement — he dreamt big and, with his irrepressible and seductive energy, encouraged the next generation of creatives emerging out of apartheid to do likewise. Naidoo described him as “a builder of dreams”.
Mayet, his friend and curator of the DuoTone Gallery exhibition space attached to the festival, said what marked out Lombard’s jazz photography was an intimacy born from a connection both on and off the stage: “Rashid had a way of getting into musicians and their lives, which was apparent in his photos. He knew everyone, but musicians especially — and he was one of only two photographers, together with Peter Magubane, that Abdullah Ibrahim [who was notoriously irascible about photographers] actually stomached.” A collection of his photography, edited by the late George Hallett, Jazz Rocks, was published in 2010.
Born in Gqeberha (then Port Elizabeth) in 1951, Lombard moved to Cape Town with his family when he was 11. He worked as an architectural draughtsman before developing his love for photography.
He set up the Cape Town Press Centre in the 1980s with photographers like John Rubython and Jimi Matthews, worked for media outlets like AFP and alternative newspapers like South and Grassroots. Lombard was also published in books like South Africa: The Cordoned Heart (1986). During that period he also contributed to group exhibitions at the University of Zimbabwe in 1983 and the Staffrider exhibitions of 1984 and 1985.
A black man during apartheid, Lombard eschewed “objectivity” in his work and once said that “you can only get a certain kind of image for news” — deciding to forgo that “bang-bang” approach to “document what happens”. He explained that this conceptual (and political) impulse and philosophy to me such: “An eye through the lens is an intensely subjective experience, regardless of the subject. Numerous other factors — light, aperture, lens, focus — come into play, no more so than the moment of taking the photograph. During those days, it was critical to capture what happened as such was hidden from the eyes of the world and the country. ‘What the eye does not see, the heart does not feel’, as has been said. I set out to capture as much of what happened as possible.”
In 1986 Lombard received a placement at Magnum Photos in New York with the assistance of Magubane. There he learnt under the great Eli Reed, hung out with Ibrahim and his partner Sathima B Benjamin and learnt “the art of photography”.
He also met Ernest Cole, the SA photographer in exile, who had published the seminal House of Bondage. Cole, the subject of a recent documentary by Raoul Peck, was depressed and living on the streets at the time. He had not taken a photograph in several years. He lifted up Lombard’s camera for a series of portraits of his newfound friend — possibly some of the last Cole had ever taken before his death. Lombard described their time together as “special beyond”.
Lombard was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga in Silver in 2014 for his work as a photojournalist and musical impresario. Married to the political activist Colleen Rayson, Lombard spent his later years working on establishing his archive at the University of the Western Cape. He remained a scamp and an inspiration until the very end. Hamba Kahle, Boeta!
Lombard (April 10 1951-June 4 2025) is survived by his wife Colleen, children Chevon, Shadley and Yana, and several grandchildren.
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