Between 1948 and 2016, David Goldblatt returned periodically to Fietas, a suburb west of Johannesburg’s city centre, to photograph the impact of punitive segregation and ethnic cleansing wrought by apartheid legislation on its residents and landscape. Published here for the first time, his photographs form a vivid social document of Fietas before, during, and after its destruction under the Group Areas Act.

View on Mack’s webiste here.

The cover reads as a story from front to back, with a 1986 photograph of Hassimia Sahib’s partially-demolished butchery on the front cover, and a 1988 photograph showing the empty ground after the building’s complete demolition. I decided to include captions along with the photographs on the cover as, according to Brenda Goldblatt, David’s daughter and editor of the book, his narrative captions are as important as the images, and should not be read separately.