Parting shots: Fragments of an unforgotten community

South African photographer David Goldblatt (1930–2018) is among the most important visual chroniclers of South Africa. Born in Randfontein to Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant parents, he trained initially in commerce but turned full-time to photography in 1963. Over an extraordinary career spanning six decades, Goldblatt’s work probed the architecture, landscapes and social fabric of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa — not only the grand dramas of political struggle, but the quieter realities of everyday life, built spaces, and displaced communities.

The Goodman Gallery in Joburg is hosting Goldblatt’s posthumous book, Fragments of Fietas, a potent and haunting visual document of one of Joburg’s most maligned suburbs and of the people who lived there.

Between 1948 and 2016, Goldblatt returned periodically to the suburb of Fietas (also known as Pageview), west of Joburg’s city centre, to photograph the impact of punitive segregation and ethnic cleansing under apartheid’s Group Areas Act. According to the book’s press material: “Moved by the life force of the predominantly Indian community’s families, shopkeepers and small business owners, Goldblatt attempted ‘to grasp something of their life and what they had built.”

Yasmin at the kitchen door of Miss Tahera Karbelkar, Krause Street, Fietas, Johannesburg. (December 1976) (David Goldblatt, )

Fietas was for much of its history a vibrant, mixed-use suburb: narrow streets, modest homes, shops, two mosques, Hindu and Tamil schools, and a layered community life. But in the face of apartheid-era urban planning, the suburb’s non-white residents were forcibly removed – buildings demolished, the community fractured. Goldblatt’s photographs record that rupture, showing Fietas before, during and after its destruction, while remaining attentive to what survived – a shopfront, a street, a face of memory.

In the Docrat living room before its destruction under the Group Areas Act, 20th Street, Fietas, Johannesburg. (1977) (David Goldblatt, )

The book collects these images for the first time, pairing them with interviews of past and present residents that recall the kind of testimonies Goldblatt captured in earlier works such as The Transported of KwaNdebele and Ex‑Offenders at the Scene of Crime. The result is a fusion of photographic witnessing and oral history, a social document inviting us to linger in the rubble of a neighbourhood erased.

The Modis in their shop on 17th Street before its destruction. (1976) (David Goldblatt, )

Goldblatt’s work is praised for its subtlety. He photographed the “structures” of society: homes, shops, landscape, exposing the systems that shaped lives, saying that he sought “a modest, hidden complexity”. Fragments of Fietas expresses this mode of engagement: the large-scale system of apartheid is rendered through the small scale of homes, families, shop counters, doorways.

At home In Fietas, before its destruction under the Group Areas Act. (David Goldblatt, )

Fietas is emblematic, a microcosm: life built under duress, community thriving in place, the state’s machinery arriving to uproot. Goldblatt’s images are a historical record and aesthetic meditation.

As the press information notes, the photographs aren’t just archival. They’re invitations to remember, reflect and ask what remains when winter has faded.

Fireplace in Fietas, Johannesburg (David Goldblatt, )

Paired with the voices of Fietas residents at the gallery, the book will give visitors a chance to sit with what displacement looks like, depicted by an artist who returned, camera in hand, over decades.

A backyard mechanic and his sons, Vrededorp, Johannesburg. (1977) (David Goldblatt, )

Fragments of Fietas is 224 pages of memory, architecture, community, loss and renewal. The images span the period 1948 to 2016, a record of the past but also of what happens in the aftermath. In the words of the photographic-provocateur himself: “This isn’t propaganda; it’s what remains when the bulldozers have gone and the storefronts stand empty, when the homes are changed but the stories persist.”

Listening to the cricket commentary on a Saturday afternoon in Fietas. (1977) (David Goldblatt, )

If you’re in Joburg this week, go stand before the prints, converse with the book, and let Goldblatt’s lens take you into the unforgotten memories of Fietas.