Reviews — Melanie Friend

Recent reviews of group shows at Tate Britain (2023/4)

Extract from review of The 80s: Photographing Britain (Tate Britain, 21 November 2024 – 5 May 2025)

‘…The 80s were punctuated by inner-city riots in Liverpool, Bristol and elsewhere and their dismal aftermaths – smouldering cars, burnt-out buildings – remain resonant. The decade culminated with the poll tax affray in central London, a violent disruption of the everyday perfectly evoked by Friend’s portraits of two bemused Japanese tourists holding HMV shopping bags while thick smoke billows from a burning barricade behind them…’ Sean O’Hagan, The Observer (The New Review), 24 November 2024

Extracts from reviews of my 1988 work Mothers’ Pride in the group exhibition Women in Revolt! (Tate Britain, 8 Nov 2023 – 7 April 2024)

’… 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, The Financial Times, 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

The Plain (2020)

The ‘i’ Newspaper review 9 October 2020

Financial Times, Review by Chris Allnutt, Life & Arts, Saturday Weekend

C4 Journal. Review by Lucy Rogers

The Morning Star: A Conflicted Landscape of War and Peace. Review by John Green

Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Journal, Jan/Feb 2021, My Place

On Landscape magazine, Interview with MF by Charlotte Parkin, PDF (high res available on request)

L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography))

The Home Front (2013)

Comments from academics Julian Stallabrass, Wendy Kozol, Blake Fitzpatrick, Robert JC Young and Charles Hustwick

Discussed in Claudette Lauzon’s book The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art, University of Toronto, 2017, Open Access PDF viewable here see page 63

British Journal of Photography This is War issue, August 2014

Photography and Culture journal, November 2015

Photomonitor, Review of the Home Front exhibition by Rachel Segal Hamilton

Source magazine, Spring 2014 review by Edward Welch

Aesthetica magazine, The Home Front at Impressions Gallery

Flux Magazine Melanie Friend's The Home Front, War Games for all the Family 11 September 2013

KATALOG feature

Photomonitor listings

War and Media Network

Discover Society, 6 January 2014

Gaslight Photography, 2015, short review of BJP This is War feature see p15, 16

More reviews of other works to follow soon…

Border Country (2007)

The Guardian, 7 November 2008, article Here for some time by Marc Leverton

Red Pepper, review of Border Country by Amanda Sebesteyn, April, May 2008

Culture Wars by Chris Gilligan (pdf)

https://www.academia.edu/252636/Review_Border_Country_Photographs_by_Melanie_Friend_UK_Tour (live link to Academia eu)

Article by MF on the making of Border Country, for FQS Volume 11, No. 2, Art. 33 – May 2010

Black Flash (Canada), extract from review by Katy McCormick

Globe and Mail (Toronto) review of Border Country by R.M. Vaughan

TAZ (Germany) review of ECB award, inc mention of Border Country

more to come soon…

No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo (2001, USA)

The Progressive (USA) review by Marlene Nadle

Oakland Tribune (USA), review by Kate Scannell

Boston Globe (USA) photo caption, 9 April 2002

Library Journal (USA) review by Natasa Musa

Booklist (USA) 2002

Illyria (USA) review by Puja Aswani, April 2002

The Independent (UK), Books of the Year, NPLH selected by Amanda Hopkinson

The Financial Times (UK) review of photobooks, International Geographic, by Jan Dalley

BBC Arts, Kosovo Portraits in Focus 11 January 2002

British Journal of Photography (UK) 2002

BACEE (British Association for Central and Eastern Europe), UK, review

Time Out (UK), 5-12 December 2001

Minority Rights Group (UK) review by Poppy Szaybo

New Internationalist (UK), review of NPLH

Katalog (Denmark, in Danish & English), review by Anthony Georgieff, 2002

Source (Ireland), 2002, review by Jane Fletcher

OJPCR online, Oct 2003, Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution

Nacional (Kosova/Albania) review (in Albanian) by Daut Dauti, 2001

Koha Ditore (Kosova) review (in Albanian) of BBC Everywoman interview with MF on NPLH

Bota Sot (Kosova) review (in Albanian) by Sami Islami

Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible (1996)

(Note: Some of these reviews were typed out back in the early days of my first website .… The original publications are in my archive at the Bishopsgate Institute)

Creative Camera 1996, review by Val Williams

Spot magazine (USA), 1999, review by Dick Doughty

Mute, Digital Art Critique, 1996, review by Josephine Berry.

Art and Design (October 1996 issue on Art and The Home, Academy Editions).

Birmingham Post, review of Claustrophobia, inc H & G by Terry Grimley

The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art, Claudette Lauzon, 2017, University of Toronto press (a search for Homes and Gardens within this document will bring up several pages of discussion)

more to come…