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‘What would you do if you had 24 hours to leave your home, what would you take, who would you go with, how would you leave and would you, in effect go?’

The year in which photographer Jillian Edelstein turned 40 she came across an image of her great aunt Minna, of whose existence she had been unaware. The photograph of Minna became the catalyst for a journey to unearth her family history and the discovery of an unknown branch of her family living in Ukraine. Here and There documents Edelstein’s family odyssey and expands to encompass photographs made throughout her career, inextricably linked by the thread of human displacement.

‘All my life people have asked me about my origins. Frequently they try to guess. ‘You must be Spanish?No…then Greek?…No…Italian…Arab?’ And on it goes as they study my thick, dark hair, olive skin and dark eyes. Finally, I started replying,‘Russian-Jewish,’ without any knowledge of what it actually meant. I knew my family had originally come from a shtetl-type place somewhere in Russia a long time before my parents were born. But that was all.’

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.

London-based photographer Jillian Edelstein was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa. She attended the LCC photojournalism course in the UK after graduating from he University of Cape Town, B.Soc.Sc (Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology Social Work). Her portraits have appeared internationally in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The FT Weekend Magazine, Vanity Fair, Interview, Vogue, Port, The Guardian Weekend, The Sunday Times Magazine, Time, Fortune, Forbes, GQ and Esquire.

Her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers' Gallery, The Royal Academy, and OXO Gallery in London; Sothebys and Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in France, Bensusan Museum, Robben Island Museum in South Africa and Dali International Photography Festival, Yunnan Province, China. Edelstein is the recipient of awards including Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year Award, the Visa d’Or at the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan in 1997, the European Final Art Polaroid Award in 1999, and the John Kobal Book Award. In 2018 she was included in the ‘Hundred Heroines’ list of women from across the world who are transforming photography today, initiated by The Royal Photographic Society. Her first monograph Truth and Lies was published by Granta in 2002.