Truth & Lies
Jillian Edelstein
Sept 14 - Oct 10, 2010


Jillian spent four years attending hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission up and down South Africa. She set up her camera in makeshift studios in rooms next door to where the hearings were held and visited people at home in the townships or deep in the countryside to take their portraits and listen to their stories. The selected images within this exhibition is a collective portrait of a country which, between the Sixties and Nineties, was engaged in a vicious struggle in which thousands were abducted, tortured and killed. These powerful images tell some of these stories and puts faces to the personal testimonies of victims and perpetrators.
Praise for Jillian's Truth & Lies:
"Jillian Edelstein's pictures take us back to the way it really was: the municipal halls, the men and women listening to the testimony on earphones in Xhosa, Afrikaans or English... All this detail is essential to any understanding of what abstractions like truth, justice and reconciliation actually mean. Jillian Edelstein has preserved the reality of the process so that we will remember that truth and reconciliation were the work of individuals, who refused to live with silence, with lies, with equivocations and excuses." - Michael Ignatieff
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Exhibition
14 Sept - 10 Oct 2010

Private Viewing
14 Sept 2010, 6pm -7pm

Public Event
14 Sept 2010, 7pm - 9pm
Entrance Fee: £15*
Concession: £12**
** Students, retirees and unemployed
Redeemable for £5 off books purchased in store

Click to view details on the public event

About Jillian Edelstein

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London based photographer Jillian Edelstein was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. She began working as a press photographer in Johannesburg on the Rand Daily Mail and the Star. In 1985 she emigrated to London to study at the London College of Printing. Her portraits have appeared in many publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Interview. She has worked on campaigns for Comic Relief, The Dogs Trust, The National Theatre, The National Portrait Gallery, Abbot Mead Vickers BBDO, EMI, UNICEF, Save The Children Fund, and The Royal Shakespeare Company.

She has received several awards including the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year in 1986, 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.

Between 1996 and 2002 she returned to South Africa frequently to document the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her award-winning book Truth and Lies, shot in large format was published by Granta in 2002. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally at venues including the National Portrait Gallery, The Photographers Gallery, The Royal Academy New Art Space, the Tom Blau Gallery in London, the Recontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, the Bensusan Museum,Johannesburg,and Robben Island Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.

She is working on the publication of her next book which includes work on her family, exploring the themes of migration and Ancestry incorporating archival images and a photo essay on the Sangoma, the traditional healers who live, heal and train in the mountains on the Lesotho/South African border.

To learn more about Jillian, visit her website