Friendships explored through photography

Friendships can be a very complex subject to incorporate into a photography project. My latest project touches on briefly on this topic as it was very relevant to my final year, which the project is based on. Other photographers who touch on this subject include Melissa Schreik and Theresa Babb.

Melissa Schriek focused her project on specifically female friendships. Based in Amsterdam, Schrieks aim with this project was to capture the people, their environment and the sisterhood that is a huge part of female friendships. The images in this series consist of young women in a performative sense, she uses a documentary style to capture these staged moments. In an interview with Elena Vaninetti, Schriek goes into detail about how this project came about, she explains that the togetherness and loyalty she has always found in female friendships is something to be admired and respected which is why she wanted to create this piece of work so highlight the positive female friendships can often be looked upon as bitchy and competitive.

Theresa Babbs project is an historical series of images dating back to the 1890’s. Throughout her series of images she captures so many different elements of friendships, one of the images denotes a group of women sat around having a beer together, whilst another shows two women enjoying a canoe ride together. One of the main similarities in all her images is how happy the subjects are, they are all beaming, and that is the effects of true friendships.

Having looked at both of these women’s projects I was able to have a greater understanding about how I could incorporate an element of friendship into my own personal project without it becoming too cliché. I also took away the idea that although I was trying to capture raw and honest moments for my project, I could also stage moments if I thought it necessary and combine the ideologies of performative and documentary photography.