Here and There
By Jillian Edelstein
This acclaimed photographer discovers a lost branch of her family, drawing her into stories of displacement that we all hold in common.
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Here and There is a personal chronicle that expands into a series of photographs on the displacing of humans in general.
When Jillian Edelstein discovered an unknown branch of her family were living in the Ukraine, the sense of inequality that was so familiar to her from having grown up in Apartheid South Africa was given another dimension. In particular, as the story emerged of her great aunt Minna, whose life was punctuated by three forced evacuations and who coincidentally had died the same year Jillian was born, the fate of Minna's brothers and their descendants, who had prospered as Whites in South Africa, developed ever greater contrast.
Later in the same year that she first saw Minna's photograph, Jillian was commissioned to photograph the South African Sangoma shamans, whose rituals employ the intermediary healing powers of their ancestors. A shaman told Jillian that her own ancestors were in conflict. Catalysing a growing determination to untangle her family's hidden history, Jillian began a journey that took her from her chosen home in London to the heartland of the Ukraine and then to her grandfather’s birthplace in Latvia.
Refracting images of displaced people through the lens of her family’s own mystery, Jillian reaches the refugee history we all have in common, whether we know its details or not.
Special thanks to Counterpoints Arts – a creative hub producing projects by and about refugees and migrants. See here: www.counterpointsarts.org.uk
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Jillian Edelstein
Jillian Edelstein's award-winning work has been widely published and exhibited internationally.
She has received several awards including the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year Award 1990, the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan in 1997, the European Final Art Polaroid Award in 1999, the John Kobal Book Award 2003 and was included in The Taylor Wessing Portrait Award in 2014, the AI–AP Archive in 2008 and 2015. A winner in Latin American Fotografia 4 2015, she has been included in World Press Awards twice.
Her book Truth and Lies (2002), about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, won the Visa D’Or in Perpignan and the John Kobal Book Award in 2002. Over one hundred of her photographs currently reside in the National Portrait Gallery.
http://www.jillianedelstein.co.uk
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I was born in South Africa, the same year that my great aunt Minna, my paternal grandfather’s sister, died in the Ukraine. The poignancy of this coincidence seems great to me now, because until 2002 I had no idea of Minna’s existence. I knew that my grandfather, Abraham, and his two brothers, Charles and Sascha, had fled their village in Latvia at the beginning of the last century, made their way across Europe and eventually boarded a ship to South Africa. I had even heard the story of how my grandfather sailed down the Volga disguised as a woman to avoid being caught and drafted into the Russian army. What I didn’t know was that their sister Minna, her husband Georg and their two small daughters, together with Minna’s parents (my great grandparents Isaak and Tomer) and her grandmother (my great, great grandmother, Zita) were planning to reach South Africa, too.
After being forced to leave Latvia, they travelled south, through what is now the Ukraine, and arrived in Feodosia on the Black Sea in November 1920, just as the Red Army occupied the town and closed the port. Having lost their chance to escape, they would remain in the Soviet Union for the rest of their lives. They quite literally missed the boat.
- 17th January 2020 An Upcoming Exhibition and a Ferry to Athens
An upcoming exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Camden is serving to focus mind and my attention on the closing moments of the crowd fund for my book Here and There: The Search for Great Aunt Minna. The time it has taken to raise the funds, and I am extremely grateful to all of you for your generosity, has helped in the fact that I have been using the time to rewrite the narrative and to enhance the…
3rd July 2019 You, Me and Those Who Came Before - Judith Kerr, Esther Freud and David MillibandAs part of Refugee Week earlier this year, (17 - 23 June 2019) Counterpoint Arts commissioned internationally renowned Jillian Edelstein to respond to the festival's theme, 'You, Me and Those who Came Before'. Her series of portraits looked at eleven prominent public figures who share a refugee heritage.
The series previewed at the Tate Exchange before transferring to the V&A for a week.
Here…21st February 2019 George Sacks, Communism and RussiaAmong the family relatives that has an impact on my life was my grandmother’s brother, George Sacks – an intellectual and a communist – and his wife Betty. George had left for England during the apartheid era. Communism was particularly despised by the South African authorities. They referred to it’s ideology as the ‘Rooi Gevaar’ – literally that translates as the ‘Red Threat’. The level of paranoid…
26th September 2018 Ukraine visitI last visited Ukraine in 2002 desperately seeking answers. I wanted to understand why one branch of my father's family had disappeared, never to be seen again. Not talked about, conveniently forgotten, lost to history. I wanted to rectify that, to reinsert them into the family map. Before I went that first time I had the contents of one email to go on - a forced expulsion from the Latvian family…
10th April 2018 Thank youNext month I am flying to Ukraine. I will be driving from Kiev to Dnipropetrovsk to visit Victor, my Great Aunt Minna's grandson. I last made the journey ten years ago. Since then there have been many changes: Victor went, in his words, 'bust', lost the milk plant where, having given up his job as a state paid scientist, had been attempting to manufacture experimental kosher condensed milk - 'not…
6th February 2018 Travel TipsI thought I would share this little diary note I made soon after I arrived back in the UK from Colombia in mid-July.
I am back in the familiar terrain of North London. The crows are making a din outside – now I associate that sound with the ‘corbeau’s of Rwanda and, I think, the macaws of Colombia and the last daredevil trip I made to the mangrove swamp on my last day there in spite of the Dengue…20th November 2017 It came out of left fieldJust before leaving for my father’s consecration in Cape Town last month, my 22-year-old son forwarded me an email
he had received via the genealogy site where he had been building a family tree. Someone was looking for anyone connected to my maternal Grandfather, Jack Sovinsky. Someone was looking for me.
Hello Jillian,We live in Paarl, a beautiful town some 60 km north of Cape Town. It…
14th August 2017 Emigration, Displacement and StruggleI left South Africa thirty years ago in order to pursue my photographic career - and to leave the political landscape of South Africa that I abhorred. I had grown up with Apartheid.
I have used the camera in my life as many things - in my earlier career as a photographer on The Rand Daily Mail as a 'weapon' against the repressive regime, recording events that the public might otherwise have been…
29th June 2017 El Camino De La MuerteFirst published on http://www.jillianedelstein.co.uk/ 2nd March 2016
In order to do this post I have to go back a bit. At this moment I am in India, having arrived here from China this morning. But for now I have to go back to Rwanda. Back to a sleepless night in Kigali soon after having returned there from Gisenyi close to the DRC border with Rwanda…
13th June 2017 Emergencia(Originally published on http://www.jillianedelstein.co.uk/, July 25 2014)
I missed the pilots shout of Emergencia that came across the intercom system. I don’t know why. I was told later that it sounded faintly hysterical – a pitch or two too high for comfort. I did hear the only English announcement – a garbled one at that – about oxygen masks. It was then…
20th May 2017 Week 2A few days ago I discovered that the Sangoma, the traditional healers who were living in the Valley,
and who partly inspired this project, have been kicked off their ancestral land.
I understand that a wealthy businessman bought the land in the Eastern Free State near the Lesotho border
and that the army and local police were instructed to move in to ensure that the Valley dwellers were
…9th May 2017 Kicking off- Day 1Jake Lee, whom I met at a Counterpoints seminar at Dartington, kindly and generously kicked off the pledging yesterday as it went live. I am indebted to him and to Aine O'Brien and Dijana Rakovic at Counterpoints who followed suit swiftly thereafter. Thanks also to my best colleagues Antonio Olmos, Stuart Freedman, Del Barrett of the RPS, and to my dear friend Judy Friedberg . You all rock, as they…
These people are helping to fund Here and There.
Helen Constantinou
Sarah Hogan
kate abbey
Elana Ochse
Gerry Brakus
Mimi Mollica
Eleanor Ekserdjian
Brian Griffin
nicky shinder
Caroline Wicht
RICHARD JEWELL
Therese Barry
Carol Allen-Storey
David Wicht
Wendy Carrig
Sophie Ratcliffe
Clive Helfet
Simon Robinson
Sonja van Amelsfort
Susan Bittker
Charlotte Colbert
Fiona Shields
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