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.
Featured Artworks
Create a Goodman Gallery account to view pricing of available artworks and access purchasing.
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.
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.
Artist Bio
David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.
In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.
In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2001, a retrospective of his work, 'David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years' began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, 'David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC' (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.
Goldblatt 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.
Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.
Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
