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

Book sections

Selected exhibitions

Research papers

References

  1. The Home Front, Katalog Journal, No.24/1, Spring 2012
  2. Border Country, The Guardian, Friday 7 November 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/nov/07/border-country-immigration-removal-centres
  3. Friend, M (2010) Representing Immigration Detainees: The Juxtaposition of Image and Sound in "Border Country", Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, Art. 33, May
  4. Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
  5. Impressions Gallery

External links

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