DAVID GOLDBLATT

We greeted each other. I said, ‘Mr Docrat, I cannot tell you how ashamed I am. I cannot bear to think that this is being done to you in my name as a white South African.’

He thanked me. Three generations of his family had lived there. The house built by his grandparents, which he had inherited, still stood nearby. The shop that he had taken over from his father, and which he had built into a thriving business, was around the corner. We spoke about the twenty-year struggle against the Group Areas proclamation for Pageview, known to its people as Fietas. He said that the community had fought in every way possible to keep Fietas alive.

‘Now we have to accept that Fietas is dead.’

Then we spoke of the destruction. He said, ‘I feel as though my teeth are being pulled out one by one. I run my tongue over the spaces and I try to remember the shape of what was there.’

These photographs, made between 1949 and 2016, tell of the destruction of a community for a racist dream, and its sequel.

— David Goldblatt, June 2012

Goodman Gallery presents Fragments of Fietas, an exhibition of photographs by David Goldblatt made predominantly in the late 1970s and 1980s, during the years when the community west of Johannesburg was being dismantled under apartheid’s racist laws. They record, in Goldblatt’s words, “the destruction of a community for a racist dream, and its sequel.”

Known officially as Pageview, but to its residents as Fietas, it was one of the few areas in Johannesburg where people of Indian descent were allowed to trade and lease land, and where those designated as Black, Chinese, or Coloured could live prior to the introduction of the Group Areas Act in 1950. In a racially divided city, it was a rare enclave of social coexistence. Residents shared stoeps and backyards, lived in close proximity, and were bound by the quiet interdependence of ordinary life.

By the late 1950s, that fabric had begun to unravel. Declared a “white area” under the Group Areas Act, the people of Fietas resisted removal while government officials waged a relentless campaign to force them to move to racially demarcated townships. Families were relocated to distant areas such as Lenasia, Eldorado Park, and Soweto. Homes and shops were demolished. What followed was an act of sanctioned forgetting, as the remnants of shared lives were levelled in the name of racial order.

Over the six decades that Goldblatt photographed Fietas and its surroundings, he returned often to bear witness to its transformation. He photographed life before, during, and after the removals, and recorded the hollow aftermath of apartheid’s ambitions—the futile attempt to build houses for white residents on the ruins of the Fietas community.

His photographs focus on the subtle marks left by time, displacement, and memory. Through these fragments he explored how the moral conditions of a society can be read in its architecture, its absences, and its silences.

Fragments of Fietas gathers these images as both testimony and elegy. For Goldblatt, to photograph was an act of moral attention—a way of acknowledging the entanglement of privilege, guilt, and responsibility. In returning to Fietas across decades, he transformed documentation into devotion: a fidelity to people and places marked by loss, and to the belief that fragments, when held and named, might still speak of what was once whole.