"This is more than a book of photographs, although the photographs are wonderful. It is a fascinating look
at the complex, contradictory, confusing process that was the Truth Commission: not only through its images but
through the eyewitness accounts, Jillian Edelstein's diary and the stories of some of the Commission's main protagonists.
It catalogues not only the pain but the triumph of ordinary people over a brutal past. It is a testimony to the
necessity of looking at what happened."
--Gillian Slovo, author of Red Dust
New Press Web Site, June, 2003
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.
Jillian Edelstein's photographs have been exhibited in London, Paris, and Johannesburg. She won the Visa d'Or at
the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan in 1997. Her portraits have been published in many periodicals
including the New York Times Magazine, the London Sunday Times Magazine, National Geographic, and the New Yorker.
She lives in London.
Michael Ignatieff is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University. He reported from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the New Yorker, to which he is a regular
contributor. He also writes for the New York Times Book Review, Granta, and the New Republic, and is the author
of several books, including Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela joined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996 as a member of the Human Rights
Violations Committee and coordinated and chaired victims' public hearings in the Western Cape. She has been a visiting
fellow at the University of Southern California, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and Harvard University, and
is currently affiliated with the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School.
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