Title: On Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible from SPOT magazine, USA, 1999 HOUSTON CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY (USA)
Author: Melanie Friend

On Homes and Gardens: Documenting the Invisible 

from Spot magazine, USA,  1999 published by the Houston Center for Photography 1999

British free-lance photographer and sometime BBC radio reporter Melanie Friend has been visiting the Balkans since 1989. The region that gripped her at once, well before it began to make headlines, was Kosovo, whose autonomy was revoked by the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that same year. Friend became familiar first-hand with the tactics of the Serbian police, who rapidly spread fear through the predominantly non-Serbian, Albanian Muslim population. As a result, her visits were generally brief and a bit clandestine, always subject to film confiscations and surveillance that put anyone who helped her potentially at risk (yet she won the confidence of many who went out of their way to help her). …She faced a dilemma that photography, dependent as it is on that which can be seen, is poorly suited to address: How do you photograph something that, within the bounds of reasonable safety, you cannot witness? Abductions took place quickly and at night over a geographically diffuse area, and there was no possibility of photographing in Serbian jails. Beatings and searches were random, and although certain areas would be closed off by the police—strong evidence that violence of some kind was being perpetrated—these events were carefully orchestrated to take place out of sight of anyone who might document it. Deprived at every turn of what journalists call "access," she was unable to extract the kind of familiar, shock-based images of conflict, which usually depend upon the juxtaposition of signs connoting the conflicting parties, that are the daily grist of war photography. Nor was there much visual evidence that could give her material for post facto images: scars, burned homes, bodies and so on. She found a society characterized by fear, and the imminent threat that once the Serbian military forces were finished in Bosnia, they would turn to the expulsion of non-Serbs in Kosovo—a fear that was to prove justified. But for Friend, the question remained: How does one photograph such a state of affairs? And given the humanitarian urgency of the situation, how does one do so in a way that can interrupt the visual monologue of news images and generate some measure of outrage to stop an atrocity? She was certainly not the first photographer to face this question, but her response to it was one of the most imaginative and thought-provoking I have seen. …What gives the book its subtle, ominous power is the viewer’s knowledge that these photographs are not at all what they seem: These are crime scenes. The absence of the literal representation of the violent act or anything—or anybody—relating to its immediate consequences, the depiction of which virtually defines war photography, throws all that violence back onto the viewer’s imagination. This is of course far more fertile ground.—Dick Doughty