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.