Fragments of Fietas gathers David Goldblatt’s photographs of a Johannesburg suburb he revisited from 1948 to 2016, tracing what apartheid legislation did to a place and to the people who made their lives there. Fietas, west of the city centre, was home to a predominantly Indian community of families, shopkeepers, and small-business owners. Goldblatt’s attention rests not only on the violence of removal but also on the dignity, resourcefulness, and daily labour through which residents built a community under hostile conditions.

The book’s structure makes that history visible through contrast. Storefronts and domestic interiors from the earlier decades appear alongside later images of demolition, while portraits of traders preserve the human scale of a landscape subjected to the Group Areas Act. Rather than treating Fietas as a vanished setting, the photographs register the relationship between place, work, memory, and enforced displacement. Their observational restraint gives the community room to appear in its own complexity.

Interviews with former and current residents extend the photographs into an oral history, recalling Goldblatt’s earlier attention to testimony in The Transported of Kwandebele and Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime. An essay by Professor Ashwin Desai situates Fietas within the longer history of Indian South Africans and racist ideology before and after apartheid. Published by MACK in 2025, this 224-page paperback is the first publication of these photographs as a collected body. For collectors, its importance lies in the coherence of that body: a sustained, empathetic record of a racially diverse community, and of a Johannesburg neighbourhood altered irrevocably by apartheid’s spatial policies.