Product Description

Startling side-by-side portraits of victims and perpetrators of apartheid, by an award-winning South African photographer. Jillian Edelstein made her first visit to a South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in 1997. What the South African-born, prize-winning photographer saw and heard moved her to begin a four-year project photographing the people who were to come forward, both victims and villains, black and white. Eventually, Edelstein traveled the length and breadth of South Africa, compiling an extraordinary record of jarring and moving images, in each case recording her subject's personal stories: from atrocities suffered to crimes committed. Her stories and portraits, intriguingly paired on facing pages, provide a remarkable insight into South Africa's recent history and the awesome difficulty of overcoming it. More than twenty thousand victims, hoping for justice and reparation, made statements to the commissioners in hearings all over South Africa, as did seven thousand perpetrators, who, encouraged by the possibility of amnesty, came forward to confess their crimes. Truth & Lies pairs more than 100 beautifully wrought black-and-white photographs, combining portraiture, landscape, and documentary photography with recorded testimony and interviews, which provide a deeply personal perspective on one of the most important social and political transitions of our time. Major new essays by Michael Ignatieff, professor of the practice of human rights policy at Harvard University, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, South African psychologist and member of the TRC, assess the legacy of the commission's work for South Africa, and, indeed, the world. 115 b/w photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #736229 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-02
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .81" h x 7.86" w x 9.90" l, 1.82 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Truth and Lies is a harrowing photographic essay by the acclaimed photographer Jillian Edelstein that chronicles South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The Commission met between 1996 and 1998 "to establish as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of gross human rights violations--killings, abductions, torture and 'severe mistreatment'--carried out in South Africa between March 1, 1960 and May 10, 1994 by conducting investigations and holding hearings".

As Michael Ignatieff argues in his perceptive introductory essay, the TRC "has become a model for other societies seeking to rebuild their ethical order and reckon with the past". Edelstein's poignant photographs of both the victims and perpetrators of the worst excesses of the apartheid regime reveal the painful and messy reality of rebuilding, remembering and "reconciliation". The most infamous cases of recent South African history are all here--the killers of Steve Biko and Ruth First, Winnie Mandela and her "Football Club", Colonel Eugene de Kock, nicknamed "Prime Evil", to name but a few. But the power of Edelstein's crisp black-and-white photographs lies in the dignity of the people whose husbands, wives and children were murdered and tortured, and the horror and callousness of those who carried out such acts. Edelstein recalls, "It was strange to come face to face with a man like Dirk Coetzee, whose actions epitomised the atrocities of the apartheid regime, and there he was all smiling and sweet and charming, offering me English breakfast tea with his gun strapped to his wrist". In Edelstein's photograph, Coetzee looks like a condemned convict. At the other extreme, Singqokwana Malgas, an ANC veteran, beams from his wheelchair, clutching a fistful of medals, telling his torturers, "If we were only going to get freedom over our dead bodies, I'd like to make them aware we've got freedom". Truth and Lies is a sobering chronicle that captures something of the insuperable problems of facing the truth and reaching reconciliation. --Jerry Brotton

From Publishers Weekly
South African photographer Jillian Edelstein's stark, memorable black-and-white photographs are the centerpiece of Truth & Lies: Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Between 1996 and 2000, Edelstein photographed dozens of victims, witnesses and perpetrators ANC activists, apartheid police officers and government officials, family members of those tortured and killed at the hearings and at their homes across South Africa. The photos are supplemented with the subjects' harrowing personal testimonies, Edelstein's crisp reportage and excerpts from the diary she kept throughout the project.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
More than three years after its report came out, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) continues to be a model for countries dealing with issues of guilt, amnesty, and forgiveness. Edelstein is a white South African photojournalist whose moving, full-page, black-and-white photographs, with brief profiles and quotes, bring readers up close to the victims, the perpetrators, and the court proceedings. As Michael Ignatieff says in his fine introduction, the portraits prevent abstraction. Sentimentality disappears. What reconciliation? A torturer poses with macho confidence, proud of himself; Edelstein wonders why he agreed to be photographed. One mother holds a handful of the hair of her son, murdered by the security police. A member of the TRC, Pumla Gobida-Madikizela, brings things into the present by discussing the role of the white bystanders to apartheid: they didn't do the killing, but they are the "beneficiaries"; she calls on them to end their silence. These are strong, disturbing images and ideas, sure to engage those concerned with apartheid history and with racism and reparations here and abroad. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved