Here and There

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 grandfathers 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 familys own mysteryreaching the refugee history we all have in common, whether its details are known or not. And thats 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. Edelsteins grandfather, two brothers and their sister Minna had grown up in Sassmacken, Latvia, were separated as teenagers and never saw each other again. Minnas 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.