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Over at Stills…

There is a quiet courage in choosing to stay with people.

Not to photograph them from a distance, or reduce them to symbols of a larger story, but simply to remain long enough for something human to emerge.

That is the thought I keep returning to as I look at Jillian Edelstein’s Among People at Stills.

Photography often carries an impossible expectation. We ask it to freeze a moment, to provide evidence, to prove that something happened. Yet the photographs that remain with us rarely succeed because they capture an event. They endure because they capture a relationship.

Edelstein’s work seems to understand that instinctively.

Across four decades her camera has travelled between extraordinary public moments and deeply ordinary lives: from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the daily rituals of swimmers entering cold water before dawn. They are very different subjects, yet they seem connected by the same question.

What keeps people together?

Not agreement.

Not certainty.

But the quiet decision to keep turning up for one another.

Perhaps that is why The Water Rats, filmed during lockdown, feels so resonant. On the surface it documents wild swimmers gathering at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the waterline it becomes something else entirely: a portrait of people refusing isolation, finding community through shared ritual at a time when ordinary human contact had become unexpectedly precious.

It reminds us that communities are often built through repetition rather than spectacle. The familiar faces. The same path. The same stretch of water. The knowledge that someone else will be there.

Photography can preserve these moments, but it also asks something of us.

To look more carefully.

To resist rushing past.

To recognise that lives are rarely defined by their headlines.

That same generosity runs through Edelstein’s portraiture. Whether photographing public figures or people whose names will never appear in newspapers, there is remarkably little hierarchy. Each person seems afforded the same dignity of attention. Fame becomes incidental. Presence becomes everything.

In a culture increasingly organised around performance, it asks us simply to witness.

And in doing so, it reminds us that being seen is not the same as being looked at.

Recognition carries care.

The view from the Fringe isn’t always found on a stage.

Sometimes it’s found in a photograph that reminds us that every life, however ordinary it appears, contains a story worth staying with.

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If you’re discovering inspiring exhibitions, performances, books or creative work during Edinburgh, we’d love to hear about them. Share your recommendations on X or Bluesky using #SundayFringe, or join us on Sunday morning as we celebrate and curate creativity from across the Fringe and beyond.

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