Melanie Friend


Melanie Friend is a British photographer/artist. From 2003 to 2019, Friend was Reader in Photography in the School of Media, Film and Music at University of Sussex, England.
WWW melaniefriend.com

Background

Born in London, Friend studied English at the University of York, and Photography at the University of Westminster and the London College of Printing. As a freelance photojournalist in the 1980s, she reported for broadcast and print media such as the World Service, BBC Radio 4, The Guardian, ''The New York Times, The Economist, and the Financial Times. From the mid-1990s, she shifted her focus to longer-term photographic projects, producing work for exhibitions and books. Her book and exhibition Border Country documents the experiences of asylum seekers detained at the UK's Immigration Removal Centres.
Friend is known for using the tension between images and sound to document conflict. Of Border Country, she writes: "The voices provide an emotional counterpoint to the formal images of the institutions..... listener/viewer to reflect both on the experience of the immigration system itself and on the wider concepts of migration and borders."
Standing By, which uses sound & still images, draws us into Friend's parents' 60-year long relationship. It focuses on their daily solving of The Daily Telegraph 'Quick' crossword, undertaken to combat memory loss. For years, Friend thought that her parents' crossword interactions were funny: how her father barked out the clues in mock-Sergeant Major style and her mother quietly came up with the answers. As they grew older and frailer, and her mother's Alzheimer's disease became apparent, the daily routine of the crossword, initiated by her father, felt increasingly crucial both as a memory exercise and a ritual where humour, conversation and banter could happen as before. The first recordings for Standing By'' were made in the year 2000; the work was completed in 2017.
Friend was a judge for the FotoDocument Awards 2013 and 2014, and is a member of FotoDocument Advisory Panel. Since 2017 she has been a judge for the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award.

Publications

Books

  • Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible. London: Camerawork, 1996.
  • No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo. USA: Midnight Editions, 2001..
  • Border Country. Belfast Exposed Photography/The Winchester Gallery, 2007..
  • The Home Front. Stockport: Dewi Lewis; Bradford: Impressions Gallery, 2013..
  • The Plain. Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 2020..

Book sections

  • "Will the bruises still show?" in: Signals: festival of women photographers Interchange Studios, London, 1994.
  • "A Documentary Photographer's strategies of representation" in Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible.
  • "Claustrophobia" in: Claustrophobia. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1998.
  • "John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award" in: "John Kobal photographic portrait award 2000". National Portrait Gallery, London..
  • "No Place Like Home: Echoes of Kosovo", a chapter in Representations of War, Migration and Refugeehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives published by Routledge, New York, 2014 eds. Christiane Schlote & Daniel Rellstab.
  • The Plain, in Spaces of War, War of Spaces Bloomsbury 2020,.

Exhibitions

Collections

Friend's work is held in the following permanent collections: