Melanie Friend

Melanie Friend is a photographer/artist and Reader in Photography in the School of Media, Film and Music at University of Sussex, England.

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 stark images and sound to document conflict.^[1][2] Of Border Country, she writes: "The voices provide an emotional counterpoint to the formal images of the institutions..[prompting the]... listener/viewer to reflect both on the experience of the immigration system itself and on the wider concepts of migration and borders." ^[3]

Friend's latest project The Home Front was nominated in 2012, and again in 2013, for the Prix Pictet, a global award in photography and sustainability.

Books

• Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible, London: Camerawork, 1996.
• No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo, USA: Midnight Editions, 2001. ISBN 978-1573441193.
• Border Country, Belfast Exposed Photography/The Winchester Gallery, 2007. ISBN 978-0952421795.
• The Home Front, Stockport: Dewi Lewis; Bradford: Impressions Gallery, 2013. ISBN 978-1-907893-41-4.

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 (1996).
• Claustrophobia. In: Claustrophobia. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1998 ISBN 9780907594581.
• John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award. In: "John Kobal photographic portrait award 2000". National Portrait Gallery, London. ISBN 9781855143180.
• No Place Like Home: Echoes of Kosovo (2001), a chapter in Representations of War, Migration and Refugeehood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives published by Routledge, New York, 2014 eds. Christiane Schlote (University of Zurich, Switzerland) & Daniel Rellstab (University of Vaasa, Finland).

Selected exhibitions

• Belfast Exposed Photography, Belfast, 16 November 2007 – 11 January 2008.
• European Central Bank Europe Photographic Award 2008: finalists’ show Cologne and Frankfurt.
• Gallery 44, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (Canada) 10 September – 16 October 2010.
• 2013: Images from The Home Front series in group show at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.^[4]
• 2013 / 2014: The Home Front, Impressions Gallery, 2013^[5] and toured to DLI Museum and Art Gallery, Durham, 2014.
• Forthcoming: The Home Front An Impressions Gallery touring exhibition, curated by Pippa Oldfield at University of Hertfordshire Galleries, 14 November 2014 – 31 January 2015 www.herts.ac.uk/artsandgalleries

Research papers

• Friend, M (2007) Homes and Gardens: Documenting the invisible, Home Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, March doi:10.2752/174063107780129699
• Friend, M (2010) Representing Immigration Detainees: The Juxtaposition of Image and Sound in Border Country, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Volume. 11, Number. 2, May

References

External links

• Official website
• Interview by Sarah Phillips in The Guardian, 2011.
• Libraries holding works by Friend
• WorldCat for Friend