Jillian Edelstein - Here and There

 '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