Melanie Friend

BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT

I worked on Mothers’ Pride 1987-88. It was my major project (focusing on teenage mothers, using image and text) for my part-time BA Photography (1984-88) at the Polytechnic of Central London. I made the work as a counter to the regular criticism of teenage mothers by Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government. The work comprised portraits of nine young women, with interview extracts in a text alongside. I started the project in rural Dorset, where I had been a teenager myself, and then continued it in London. It had a life outside the degree show and was shown as part of the Spectrum Women’s Photography Festival in 1988, with further shows at the Cambridge Darkroom, F-Stop Photography in Bath, and the group show A Daughter’s View (1992).

In 2022 it was incredibly exciting that Mothers’ Pride was selected to be part of the forthcoming exhibition Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 , curated by Linsey Young. Over the years I had kept in touch occasionally with some of the women originally interviewed and photographed but in 2022-23 I needed to reconnect with everyone in order to obtain model/interview releases for Women in Revolt! and to ensure that everyone felt OK about the inclusion of their interview texts/portraits in the show. It’s more than three and a half decades after the work was originally made for small audiences, well before social media, and before the advent of websites and widespread use of the internet. The experience of re-connecting with each individual was extraordinary and emotional; I had not seen five of the women for 35 years. For the Tate show, four of the women wished for semi-anonymity, so some names were concealed in the texts of the framed works.

I’m also very proud that two of my 1984/5 images from Greenham Common and one from an 1985 anti-racist march in Glasgow were also selected for Women in Revolt! I was a member of Format photographers in the 1980s/90s; the photographs at the Tate are from the Format Photography archives at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Mothers’ Pride is on show as part of Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 from 8 November 2023 to 7 April 2024.

Mothers’ Pride was mentioned in some of the reviews of Women in Revolt!, extracts here:

’… Documentary photography, a medium where women excelled from the start, is well represented. Melanie Friend’s “Mothers’ Pride” is an engrossing study of teenage mums, desperate and defiant …’ Jackie Wullschläger, 11 November, 2023.

…’ Political collective The Hackney Flashers, and photographers Jo Spence, Roshini Kempadoo and Melanie Friend each composed forceful and accessible poster-like arrangements of text and image. The Hackney Flashers’ Who’s Holding The Baby? (1978) details how the parlous lack of childcare in one London borough left poor mothers isolated and unable to return to work (plus ça change…). Pasted onto boards and laminated, it was shown in community centres and libraries. Kempadoo’s My Daughter’s Mind (1984-5) explores the expectations placed on women of South Asian origin. Friend’s Mother’s Pride (1988) opens up the lives of teenage (often single) mothers. All were groups of women either ignored, dismissed or actively vilified in the mainstream press…’ Hettie Judah, i Newspaper, 7 November 2023

 …’Melanie Friend makes a powerful study of desperate but proudly defiant teenage mothers’. Louisa Buck, Art Newspaper 22 November 2023

Older reviews of this work from 1980s/90s: Scroll down to the bottom of the Reviews section on the top menu of this site and see reviews under Mothers’ Pride including the 1988 Spectrum Women’s Photography Festival reviews and also reviews of A Daughter’s View (1992), the Watershed Media Centre (Bristol) show.

(Btw I did title this work Mothers’ Pride (i.e. in the plural, as it was a group of mothers, though some reviews title it Mother’s Pride…).