KEYNOTE #1: What Does Photography Mean to Me?
Presentation Type
Presentation
Start Date
8-3-2025 8:01 AM
Description
Jillian Edelstein, Photographer/ Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, London, United Kingdom
What Does Photography Mean to Me?
I’m aware that when I first picked up a camera, it was the wonder that I could use this piece of constructed metal to capture what I needed it to in that moment…that I could use photography to make a visual that could potentially change people’s minds, that could surprise the viewer, that could inform or lead someone to think differently.
From early on I became aware of the crude and inhumane system of Apartheid formed by the White government in 1948…legislating against the Black and mixed race communities.
As a child I regularly visited my grandparents at their seafront apartment. I used to gaze out across the sea at Robben Island opposite where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were held. It felt so close.
I decided that I wanted to make a difference and that the best way to do this was to follow my mother into the social sciences. I enrolled as a Sociology student at the University of Cape Town, thinking that this would lead me to connectedness, to the local disenfranchised people and to the intriguing and complex goings on in the townships that I wasn’t meant to encroach.
On campus I joined the Photographic Club. I was the only woman member - the male members made the Club Secretary. There’s a photograph of me surrounded by all the young men. It never occurred to me that there was an imbalance of gender.
I bought my first camera, a Minolta, from the local Pharmacy in the city centre, emptying my bank account of its total funds. One of the first events I ever photographed, as a student, was the demolition of the Crossroads squatter camp by the police. It was winter. The bulldozers were rolling over the tin shacks and the homeless squatters. The police and their dogs were trying to control the angry crowd. It heralded the violent confrontations between the liberation movements and the apartheid regime in the next decade. I was manhandled by the police into the back of a police van and removed from the scene.
When I graduated with a Social Sciences degree, I travelled alone to Europe for a part study-part travel year. My camera was my companion.
After returning a year later, I needed to earn and so for one year I took a job as a social worker at NICRO (National Institute for the Crime and Rehabilitation of Offenders) - the offices were adjacent to District Six, a “Coloured” (mixed race) township that was being demolished. While writing my case studies for my NICRO team, I began to photograph the ex-offenders in their homes, local gang members, the tattoo artists, community members living in the townships. At the end of that year, I resigned vowing to become a photographer.
I began photographing in the fishing village we lived in - the only functioning mixed race community in South Africa - the fishermen were needed early in the morning to go out of the harbour to bring in the catch- if they had been in the far away townships they could never have made it that early. That work gave me my very first project. An exhibition at the Market Theatre may have led me towards a more Arts based trajectory, but the show was vetoed and so I was given no choice, I moved to Johannesburg and took my first job as a press photographer, assisting a commercial photographer on the weekends.
Throughout my career I have combined auto/biography using photographic portraiture and documentary to investigate us humans, to study the concept and cultural understanding of - often what we might refer to as the ‘underdog’. But also in my portraiture work, I have taken a good look at those we dub our cultural icons in fields of arts, politics, and sport.
My work on the Truth and Reconciliation resulted in my first book, Truth and Lies, published by Granta in 2002, allowed me to investigate the atrocities of the Apartheid era.
When Mandela was released in 1990, wrongs needed to be righted. The TRC began in 1996 and was formed to do just that - perpetrators and victims came forward to tell their stories. Over a five-year period, I went back and forth from the UK to South Africa photographing Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the victims and the perpetrators as well as the landscapes they inhabited.
I funded the work with commissioned editorial work. That work was and has been mainly portraiture - I have had the privilege of meeting and photographing so many of my heroes - writers like Primo Levi, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith to musicians - classical and contemporary - that I admire like Marianne Faithfull, Blur, Leonard Cohen, Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello.
To actors I love - Helena Bonham Carter, Colin Firth, Daniel Day Lewis, John Malkovich, fashion icons like Armani and Vivienne Westwood. And several politicians who have made history in their own way - like Mandela and Tony Blair.
My book Here and There: An Expedition of Sorts was published last year.
It began back in 2002, soon after Truth and Lies was published; it was as if I was being called by my Ancestors as I began to photograph the Sangoma, South African traditional healers, who are called by their ancestors to heal. If they don’t heed the calling bad things start to happen. At the same time I discovered that there was a missing branch of my family, who had been thrown out of the family home in a little village in Latvia. They had to go in search of a new home - they ended up settling in Dnipro, Ukraine. The work took me to Lesvos and Calais, Lampedusa and Linosa islands; I made images of the Boat Cemetery in Lampedusa…..haunting, when looking at the Refugee theme related to the concept of Absence, Home and Displacement.
Perhaps this stems from a desire to honour lost lives, to somehow immortalise, as Jean Luc Nancy puts it: to “[bring] back from absence”. When I was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to capture survivors for a Holocaust exhibition, the project proved what I have found all along - when faced with brutality, hatred, homophobia, violence, racism, intolerance - the human spirit is so very powerful. It is sad that these themes continue to resonate today.
Photography has given me the gift, the allowance to capture life passions, be they joyous or painful. Every project that has held me for any number of years has been about a subject that needed to be set down. And it has been, often, impossible for me to ignore the drive to do so.
Photographer/ film maker, Jillian Edelstein's work has been published and shown internationally. The National Portrait Gallery have added more than 100 of her portraits to their Collection. In 2018 she was voted onto the ‘Hundred Heroines’ list of international women transforming photography today. Exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Les Rencontres Internationales Arles, Robben Island Museum, South Africa, Dali International Festival, China, National Library of Lithuania, Riga. Her book Truth and Lies about the Apartheid legacy received the John Kobal Book Award, in 2003. Here and There was published in 2024. Other awards incl: Honorary Fellowship RPS, Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year, Visa d’Or, Perpignan 1997, European Art Polaroid Award, AI-AP, Latin American Fotografia, World Press Awards, LensCulture Portrait, Portrait of Humanity, Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Portrait of Britain. Her feature doc film, the Water Rats about a group of cold water swimmers during Lockdown won 3 Impact Awards. She is in the final edit of her feature doc about Norman Wexler, the BiPolar afflicted, Academy Award nominated American screenwriter.
Relational Format
Conference proceeding
Recommended Citation
Edelstein, Jillian, "KEYNOTE #1: What Does Photography Mean to Me?" (2025). Women of Photography: A 24-Hour Conference-a-thon Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025. 25.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/womenofphotography/2025/schedule/25
KEYNOTE #1: What Does Photography Mean to Me?
Jillian Edelstein, Photographer/ Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, London, United Kingdom
What Does Photography Mean to Me?
I’m aware that when I first picked up a camera, it was the wonder that I could use this piece of constructed metal to capture what I needed it to in that moment…that I could use photography to make a visual that could potentially change people’s minds, that could surprise the viewer, that could inform or lead someone to think differently.
From early on I became aware of the crude and inhumane system of Apartheid formed by the White government in 1948…legislating against the Black and mixed race communities.
As a child I regularly visited my grandparents at their seafront apartment. I used to gaze out across the sea at Robben Island opposite where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were held. It felt so close.
I decided that I wanted to make a difference and that the best way to do this was to follow my mother into the social sciences. I enrolled as a Sociology student at the University of Cape Town, thinking that this would lead me to connectedness, to the local disenfranchised people and to the intriguing and complex goings on in the townships that I wasn’t meant to encroach.
On campus I joined the Photographic Club. I was the only woman member - the male members made the Club Secretary. There’s a photograph of me surrounded by all the young men. It never occurred to me that there was an imbalance of gender.
I bought my first camera, a Minolta, from the local Pharmacy in the city centre, emptying my bank account of its total funds. One of the first events I ever photographed, as a student, was the demolition of the Crossroads squatter camp by the police. It was winter. The bulldozers were rolling over the tin shacks and the homeless squatters. The police and their dogs were trying to control the angry crowd. It heralded the violent confrontations between the liberation movements and the apartheid regime in the next decade. I was manhandled by the police into the back of a police van and removed from the scene.
When I graduated with a Social Sciences degree, I travelled alone to Europe for a part study-part travel year. My camera was my companion.
After returning a year later, I needed to earn and so for one year I took a job as a social worker at NICRO (National Institute for the Crime and Rehabilitation of Offenders) - the offices were adjacent to District Six, a “Coloured” (mixed race) township that was being demolished. While writing my case studies for my NICRO team, I began to photograph the ex-offenders in their homes, local gang members, the tattoo artists, community members living in the townships. At the end of that year, I resigned vowing to become a photographer.
I began photographing in the fishing village we lived in - the only functioning mixed race community in South Africa - the fishermen were needed early in the morning to go out of the harbour to bring in the catch- if they had been in the far away townships they could never have made it that early. That work gave me my very first project. An exhibition at the Market Theatre may have led me towards a more Arts based trajectory, but the show was vetoed and so I was given no choice, I moved to Johannesburg and took my first job as a press photographer, assisting a commercial photographer on the weekends.
Throughout my career I have combined auto/biography using photographic portraiture and documentary to investigate us humans, to study the concept and cultural understanding of - often what we might refer to as the ‘underdog’. But also in my portraiture work, I have taken a good look at those we dub our cultural icons in fields of arts, politics, and sport.
My work on the Truth and Reconciliation resulted in my first book, Truth and Lies, published by Granta in 2002, allowed me to investigate the atrocities of the Apartheid era.
When Mandela was released in 1990, wrongs needed to be righted. The TRC began in 1996 and was formed to do just that - perpetrators and victims came forward to tell their stories. Over a five-year period, I went back and forth from the UK to South Africa photographing Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the victims and the perpetrators as well as the landscapes they inhabited.
I funded the work with commissioned editorial work. That work was and has been mainly portraiture - I have had the privilege of meeting and photographing so many of my heroes - writers like Primo Levi, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith to musicians - classical and contemporary - that I admire like Marianne Faithfull, Blur, Leonard Cohen, Burt Bacharach, Elvis Costello.
To actors I love - Helena Bonham Carter, Colin Firth, Daniel Day Lewis, John Malkovich, fashion icons like Armani and Vivienne Westwood. And several politicians who have made history in their own way - like Mandela and Tony Blair.
My book Here and There: An Expedition of Sorts was published last year.
It began back in 2002, soon after Truth and Lies was published; it was as if I was being called by my Ancestors as I began to photograph the Sangoma, South African traditional healers, who are called by their ancestors to heal. If they don’t heed the calling bad things start to happen. At the same time I discovered that there was a missing branch of my family, who had been thrown out of the family home in a little village in Latvia. They had to go in search of a new home - they ended up settling in Dnipro, Ukraine. The work took me to Lesvos and Calais, Lampedusa and Linosa islands; I made images of the Boat Cemetery in Lampedusa…..haunting, when looking at the Refugee theme related to the concept of Absence, Home and Displacement.
Perhaps this stems from a desire to honour lost lives, to somehow immortalise, as Jean Luc Nancy puts it: to “[bring] back from absence”. When I was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to capture survivors for a Holocaust exhibition, the project proved what I have found all along - when faced with brutality, hatred, homophobia, violence, racism, intolerance - the human spirit is so very powerful. It is sad that these themes continue to resonate today.
Photography has given me the gift, the allowance to capture life passions, be they joyous or painful. Every project that has held me for any number of years has been about a subject that needed to be set down. And it has been, often, impossible for me to ignore the drive to do so.
Photographer/ film maker, Jillian Edelstein's work has been published and shown internationally. The National Portrait Gallery have added more than 100 of her portraits to their Collection. In 2018 she was voted onto the ‘Hundred Heroines’ list of international women transforming photography today. Exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, Imperial War Museum, Les Rencontres Internationales Arles, Robben Island Museum, South Africa, Dali International Festival, China, National Library of Lithuania, Riga. Her book Truth and Lies about the Apartheid legacy received the John Kobal Book Award, in 2003. Here and There was published in 2024. Other awards incl: Honorary Fellowship RPS, Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year, Photographers' Gallery Portrait Photographer of the Year, Visa d’Or, Perpignan 1997, European Art Polaroid Award, AI-AP, Latin American Fotografia, World Press Awards, LensCulture Portrait, Portrait of Humanity, Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Portrait of Britain. Her feature doc film, the Water Rats about a group of cold water swimmers during Lockdown won 3 Impact Awards. She is in the final edit of her feature doc about Norman Wexler, the BiPolar afflicted, Academy Award nominated American screenwriter.
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