Search results for ""author jillian edelstein""

In 2002, the same year that Edelstein had discovered Minna's photograph, she was commissioned to photograph the South African Sangoma shamans, whose rituals employ the intermediary healing powers of their ancestors. A shaman told Edelstein that her own ancestors were in conflict, fuelling her growing determination to untangle her family's hidden history. Thus Edelstein began a journey that took her from her home in London to the heartland of the Ukraine, and to her grandfather’s birthplace in Latvia. In turn the journey led her to the shores of Lesvos, the West Bank, the Jungle in Calais, to the boat graveyard on the island of Lampedusa. In Here and There, Edelstein refracts images and stories of displaced people through the lens of her family’s own mystery—reaching the refugee history we all have in common, whether its details are known or not. ‘And that’s the theme that runs through my family. A veritable diaspora. South Africa, Israel, Canada, Colombia, United States, Australia, Italy, Mallorca, Ukraine. How many continents can one family possibly inhabit? … I wonder how I would feel if, from the age of my late teens, I never got to see or hear of my siblings ever again.’ Edelstein’s grandfather, two brothers and their sister Minna had grown up in Sassmacken, Latvia, were separated as teenagers and never saw each other again. Minna’s life was a series of escapes from Germans in World War I, the Red Army in the Russian Revolution and during World War II from Ukraine to Uzbekistan where she died, the same year that Edelstein was born.

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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate more than thirty years of human rights violations under apartheid. Jillian Edelstein returned to her native South Africa to photograph the work of this committee and was present at some of the most important hearings, including that of Winnie Mandela. In Truth and Lies, portraits of those who testified are accompanied by their stories. The result is a powerful and moving record of the atrocities committed under apartheid and the fight to make the truth known.

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