There is a bulldozer in Jimi Matthews’s photographic archive, surrounded by the rubble of District Six. Cape Town rises behind it but the neighbourhood that once occupied the land is disappearing. Other photographs show buildings standing almost alone in cleared spaces and streets emptied of the people who once lived there.
Matthews, a veteran photographer, filmmaker and journalist, was there with his camera as apartheid remade the landscape. Decades later, he photographed another landscape shaped by displacement, this time in Palestine.
The two bodies of work come together in From District Six to Palestine, Matthews’s new photographic exhibition, which formally opens at Museum Africa in Newtown, Johannesburg, on Friday.
Black and white photographs of the destruction of District Six are placed alongside Matthews’s images of Palestinian people, streets and landscapes. There is rubble and there are altered landscapes but there are also faces, homes, markets and the ordinary business of living.
At the heart of the exhibition is a question Matthews has been documenting for more than half a century: What happens to people when they are removed from the places they call home and what survives?
Long before most South Africans knew him as a television journalist and former SABC head of news, Matthews was a photographer. He began his career in the mid-1970s documenting apartheid and later became associated with Afrapix, the collective whose photographers produced some of the defining images of apartheid and resistance.
His photographs of District Six belong to that history. They record buildings being demolished and the landscape left behind by forced removals.
District Six was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act in 1966. More than 60 000 people were eventually forced from the area, many to the Cape Flats, while homes and businesses were demolished. Matthews photographed the destruction as it happened. The images were taken decades before he travelled to Palestine, which gives their pairing with his Palestinian photographs much of its force. His camera had recorded the bulldozers, rubble and emptied ground of District Six.
Palestine entered Matthews’s photographic work much later. In 2023, he travelled through the occupied West Bank with his camera. The photographs he brought home became Existence is Resistance, a collection of 33 images first exhibited at St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town in May that year, around the 75th anniversary of the Nakba. It later travelled to the University of Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Matthews was interested not only in occupation but in the lives being lived under it.
He photographed children, older men, markets, streets and everyday encounters alongside walls and the other physical signs of occupation.
When the work was exhibited at UCT, Matthews spoke of the friendliness and generosity he encountered and the “joyous expression of life” in social interactions, markets and food despite the conditions under which Palestinians lived.
It was that insistence on ordinary life that gave Existence is Resistance its name.
Three years later, the photographs are being shown alongside work Matthews made as a young photographer in apartheid South Africa. The new exhibition explores forced removal not only as a political act but as something whose consequences travel through generations. Its focus is on displacement and what it does to identity, culture and memory.
District Six makes that painfully familiar to a South African audience.
Apartheid planners demolished its buildings and scattered its residents across Cape Town, but the community survived in memory. Sixty years after District Six was declared a white area, its former residents and their descendants still carry its street names, stories and relationships with them. Matthews’s photographs caught the landscape while that destruction was taking place.
His Palestinian photographs are different. People fill the frames. There are walls and altered landscapes but the camera keeps returning to faces. Palestinians are not presented only through the images of violence and suffering that have come to dominate international news coverage. Seeing those photographs now gives them a weight they did not carry when Matthews took them.
They were made before 7 October 2023. They are a record of Palestinian daily life made before Gaza came to dominate much of the world’s visual understanding of Palestine.
The ordinary moments have consequently become some of the most affecting.
A face looking into the camera. Children. A conversation. People moving through a market or along a street. Matthews deliberately worked close to his subjects.
He has explained that he used a short focal length in Palestine, requiring him to approach people rather than photograph them anonymously from a distance. They knew he was there. That intimacy gives the photographs a quality very different from the images of catastrophe through which Palestine is so frequently seen.
The comparison is deliberate. Matthews places the forced removals of District Six alongside Palestinian dispossession, focusing on what the loss of land and home does to identity, memory and belonging. There is a striking historical point of departure. In 1948, the National Party came to power in South Africa and began building the system of apartheid. That year Palestinians experienced the Nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war.
From there, Matthews lets the photographs carry the conversation. His own life connects the two bodies of work. When Existence is Resistance opened at St George’s Cathedral in 2023, Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba recalled Matthews’s work as a journalist during apartheid and the television journalists who got images of repression in South Africa out to the rest of the world.
Matthews now has more than 50 years of his own photographs to draw on. The young photographer who documented the destruction of District Six could not have known that decades later he would walk through Palestine with a camera, or that photographs from those two periods of his life would eventually hang together.
In many of the District Six images, the people are gone and the camera is left with what happened to their homes and streets. In Palestine, Matthews fills his frames with people.
That contrast is difficult to shake. More than half a century separates some of these photographs. The eye behind the camera is the same.
From District Six to Palestine, an exhibition by Jimi Matthews, is at Museum Africa in Newtown, Johannesburg, until 31 October 2026 and opens on Friday. It will also form part of the 18th Jozi Book Fair at the museum from 23 to 25 October.