Jillian Edelstein: In Focus

Past display archive
14 February - 19 April 2009

Room 41a

Free

Daniel Day-Lewis
by Jillian Edelstein
23 October 2007
NPG x132099

This display celebrates over twenty years of photographic portraiture by Jillian Edelstein. The National Portrait Gallery first acquired a group of portraits by Edelstein in 1990 and has since added over eighty more subjects from the worlds of film, dance, literature, politics, art and sport. Several here, including Daniel Day Lewis, Blur and Lennox Lewis are shown for the first time.

Edelstein was born and grew up in South Africa and trained as a social worker before turning to photojournalism. She began working for the Rand Daily Mail in Johannesburg and in 1983 she won the Shell Best News Picture of the Year prize. In 1985 Edelstein moved to London and worked for a variety of publications including The Sunday Times, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and Time magazine.

Several of the portraits shown here come from Edelstein’s Affinities project for which she photographed creative or successful working partnerships from a variety of disciplines. These collaborative couples, appeared as a regular photo slot in the Saturday Telegraph magazine under the title ‘Soul Mates’.

More of Edelstein’s portraits in the Collection can be viewed on the Woodward
Portrait Explorer in the IT Gallery.


Nelson Mandela
by Jillian Edelstein
6 February 1997
NPG x128760

Colin Jackson; Linford Christie
by Jillian Edelstein
1993
NPG x45384


Damien Hirst; Jay Jopling
by Jillian Edelstein
5 November 1992
NPG x88991

Rufus Sewell
by Jillian Edelstein
2 October 2000
NPG x125006

Penelope Mary Fitzgerald (née Knox)
by Jillian Edelstein
July 1999
NPG P768