Home bittersweet home

An exhibition and book revisit Fietas, the once-vibrant Johannesburg suburb torn apart by apartheid, and the longing for a home that endures

- Kibo Ngowi

The black and white photographs in Fragments of Fietas stayed with me long after I left the Goodman Gallery. At first, I couldn't quite explain why. They're simple in a way, documentary and direct, portraits of ordinary people in a place that no longer exists as it once did. Yet as I reflected on the exhibition, I began to feel something more profound, a yearning that spoke to the meaning of the word home.

What is home, really? Is it a physical location, a plot of land, a set of walls and a roof? Or is it something less tangible, the feeling of being loved and supported, the sense of belonging that grows between people who share a place and a purpose? The more I sat with the photographs, the more I realised that it's both.

Home is people and place. It is the comfort of knowing where you will lay your head at night, but also the familiarity of streets that hold memories. It is the continuity between past and present that allows you to trace where you come from and who you have become. And it is this, perhaps more than anything, that apartheid tried to erase.

Fragments of Fietas — on at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 29 November — brings that erasure into painful focus.

Between 1948 and 2016, late South African photographer David Goldblatt returned repeatedly to Fietas, a suburb west of Johannesburg's city centre, to record the impact of apartheid’s forced removals. His camera traced the lives of a community fractured, displaced, and ultimately scattered by the Group Areas Act. Over nearly seven decades, Goldblatt documented what was lost, what remained, and what could not be rebuilt.

The exhibition coincides with the publication of a new book of the same name, edited by his daughter, Brenda Goldblatt, and featuring an essay by sociologist Ashwin Desai. Together, they form both an archive and an elegy — a record of destruction, but also of endurance.