Jillian Edelstein is a South African photographer, born in 1958 in Cape Town. She studied at the University of Cape Town and began working as a press photographer in Johannesburg in 1981, for the Rand Daily Mail and The Star. In 1985 she moved to London to join the photojournalism course at the London College of Printing, and within a year won the Kodak UK Young Photographer of the Year award. She is based in London.
From 1996 to 2002 she returned to South Africa again and again to document the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This work won the Visa d’Or at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan in 1997 and became the book Truth and Lies (Granta). Her portraits of cultural and political figures have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, and the National Portrait Gallery in London showed Jillian Edelstein: In Focus in 2009. Her book Here and There (GOST Books, 2024) follows the search for her great-aunt Minna and the story of displacement in her family.
