Melanie Friend Talk

"Gone are the political slogans, prepare for the commercial ones."
Berlin Wall / Melanie Friend / 1990.

Today we had another interesting guest speaker in Melanie Friend come into Hardwick for a presentation of her work from her Photojournalist beginnings, through her own university projects and experiences, to her more recent asylum seeker & air show documentary pieces.

I enjoyed the talk, and very much took interest in her trip to Berlin for the first New Years celebration since the fall of the Berlin Wall, where she stayed for a few days after the event, and on the morning of her flight back to the UK took an amazing image. The patrolling guards wouldn't revisit this section of the wall for a few hours, when Melanie would be at the airport, so in the cold and on the snow she ran towards the scene quickly changing lenses on her camera. 

 This pristine makeshift billboard on the historically relevant Berlin wall was the first invasion of western capitalism culture into the Communism led east. Said to be a 'cynical & disrespectful' act of commercialism, directly from one of the largest advertising agencies in the world.