David Goldblatt’s new posthumous exhibition at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery is entitled “Fragments of Fietas”. It is a selection of photographs taken by the world-renowned photographic artist over a lifetime of visiting the Johannesburg inner-city suburb and relating to the people who lived there and the community, predominantly Indian, who made it their home. The photographs, taken between 1949 and 2016, document the original community and its forced removal under the barbaric Group Areas Act of apartheid, along with the destruction of the buildings and landmarks that made up the community’s identity, to be replaced by low-cost housing reserved for whites.
The exhibition is poignant, remarkably subtle, yet also hard-hitting, a combination that was unique to Goldblatt’s visual framing of life under apartheid. It is accompanied by an equally important book of the photographs, edited by his daughter and archivist Brenda Goldblatt, and published by Mack Books in the UK. The book being published in conjunction with the exhibition allows much more latitude and depth for the subject matter, including the accounts of many Fietas residents and their families about the history and their subsequent lives. The book also provides space for Goldblatt’s own introduction to the project, which now forms the book’s foreword and articulates beautifully the emotion and investment that he had in the project. It is worth quoting at length:
“On a Sunday morning early in 1977, I rode into Fietas on my bicycle, camera and tripod behind me. The demolitions had begun: houses and shops that had been there a week ago were gone. I met Ossie Docrat walking home with the Sunday papers. 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 20-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.’
The photographs included in both book and exhibition were made in the 1970s and 1980s, during the years when the community west of Johannesburg was being dismantled under one of apartheid’s most bizarrely destructive laws. They record, in Goldblatt’s words, “the destruction of a community for a racist dream, and its sequel”.
Fietas, known officially as Pageview, was one of few areas in the city 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. The declaration of forced removal under the Group Areas Act of 1950 brought decades of resistance but the eventual destruction of Fietas and the subsequent failed attempt to install a white community in its place.
What is remarkable in both book and exhibition are the ways in which Goldblatt’s eye for framing a photograph renders it full of political meaning and emotion and doing so with the most unassuming materials— a humble shop interior or an antique sewing machine resting on a window ledge. His ability to move between both people and their interior domestic lives, and the larger questions and concerns of the architecture of an entire community disappearing under the bulldozers, is here beautifully and heartbreakingly captured.
At the packed launch of the exhibition and book at the Goodman Gallery, one of the speakers was Mohammed Docrat, the son of Goldblatt’s interlocutor in Fietas, Ossie Docrat. The photograph of two of the women of his Fietas household in their living room before the destruction of their house lives long in the memory.
This is an increasingly rare opportunity to see work by Goldblatt on exhibition, since much of his archive is now held in the US. Among numerous other honours in his storied career, including being the first SA artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad Award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the ministry of culture of France. The present show is a crucial reminder of where we’ve come from and the importance of remembrance.
Fragments of Fietas runs at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg until November 29.
goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/johannesburg-gallery-david-goldblatt-fragments-of-fietas
