No Place Like Home:
Echos from Kosovo
Melanie Friend
Through 75 color photographs and 50 accompanying personal testimonies, No Place Like Home offers an extraordinary insight into how history is lived by ordinary citizens. How do people persist with the chores of daily life, knowing that at any time their villages, or even their own homes, may be targeted for terror? How do they survive the murder of entire families? Or the hope of ever finding loved ones who have disappeared? How do they live in the landscapes where massacres took place—and reconcile the thirst for revenge with the need for peace of mind? These questions, which can be asked in the aftermath of any act of violence, are the subject of No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo.
MELANIE FRIEND’s work has appeared in Newsweek, The Guardian, The Independent, Granta, Mother Jones, and Marie Claire among other publications. Her photographs of Kosovo have been exhibited at Camerawork, the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Houston Center for Photography, and at the Hasselblad Center in Sweden. She lives in London.
Selected Reviews
No Place Like Home was selected as one of the “Best Books of the Year” in The Guardian (UK), The Independent (UK), Time Out (UK) and The Financial Times (Global Edition)
GRANTA
“Melanie Friend’s remarkable photographs and interviews show us the human particularity that lies within phrases such as ‘ethnic conflict’ and ‘civil war’ — and help us understand how communal hatred and savagery can break out of (and into) the most peaceful field, the most ordinary living room, and what happens after it does. The power of her book doesn’t come from obviously shocking pictures; the shock is the realization that these suddenly-changed and cancelled lives were once so like our own.” —Ian Jack
THE HASSELBLAD CENTER
“These are not war photographs in the way we would expect, but calm statements of witness, filled with a pathos which even the best of photojournalism could not hope to convey….” —Val Williams, Curator
BBC WORLD SERVICE
“Melanie Friend’s volume of photographs and accompanying personal testimonies provides an extraordinary insight into Kosovo’s turbulent recent history through the eyes of its ordinary people. Albanians, Serbs, Roma, Turks and Kosovo’s other ethnic communities tell their stories of suffering, flight, resistance, intolerance and comradeship against the backdrop of an often hostile political and social environment. The understated, even restrained imagery—portraits, homes and landscapes—is in sharp contrast with the atrocities chronicled by the victims or their close relatives and friends. It is a book that enriches our knowledge of Kosovo and inspires deeper reflection about the wider Balkans.” —Gabriel Partos
BOOKLIST (USA), November 15, 2001
“A poignant testimony to the hardship of civil war.”
OAKLAND TRIBUNE (USA), November 11, 2001
“I am compelled to write of this extraordinary book because of its power to humanize words like “casualties” and “collateral damage”—technical terms that sterilize the bloody, fleshy facts of human lives burned, shot, tortured, butchered, starved to death in war. …The stories and portraits in this book break through the distance of “foreign” war correspondence. In a timely and necessary way, they remind us, one damaged and tortured life after another, how individual human histories are uniquely lived or lost to wars. And how someone continues to live -- to wash the sink, make tea, till the garden and fix the roof—when death is closer than the shirt one wears.” —Kate Scannell
THE FINANCIAL TIMES (Global Edition), November 25, 2001
“Brings stark and simple, bright colour portraits from the refugee camps of Macedonia, set against the testimonies of survivors—the late-night knock from the soldiers, the precious clutched family photographs, the jewellery buried in flowerbeds against the hope of return, the mourning of exiles. This moving book documents ordinary people in extraordinary times.” —Jan Dalley
HOUSTON CENTER FOR PHOTOGRAPHY (USA)
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
TIMEOUT (U.K.), December 4, 2001
“A powerful book of photos and personal accounts of the war in Kosovo, as seen through the eyes of ordinary Albanians, Serbs, Roma and Turks affected by the conflict. Photojournalist Melanie Friend has taken time to meet the people behind the news stories (pictured below), and to stick around after the rest of the press pack have moved on.”
THE VILLAGE VOICE (U.S.A), Week of December 12-18, 2001
“No Place Like Home: Echoes From Kosovo lends the concept of collateral damage startling specificity.” —Joy Press
THE INDEPENDENT (U.K.), 01 December 2001, Best Books of the Year
“A hauntingly evocative homage to the people the photographer lived and worked with under the Milosevic regime.”
LIBRARY JOURNAL (USA), March 1st 2002
“Those who study world conflicts from afar tend to portray both the perpetrators and their victims through a series of politically correct phrases, often masking just what years of oppression, ethnic cleansing, and nationalistic intolerance (to name just a few terms often used to describe Kosovo) mean for the common people who must bear the consequences. This remarkable collection reveals how easy it is for those in power to manipulate the feeling of nationalism and systematically create an environment in which brutality becomes part of life. Friend, a British photographer who has covered Kosovo’s political turmoil since 1989, has collected some 50 interviews that she conducted with Albanian refugees in neighboring Macedonia after the conflict culminated in early 1999. The compelling and often disturbing photographs that accompany them serve not only to document the actual experiences of Kosovo’inhabitants but to help us understand why the region must remain multiethnic for the good of all. Finally Friend acknowledges the difficulty faced by the international community in its attempt to bring peace to the region. Highly recommended for all interested in international conflicts.” —Natasa Musa
MINORITY REPORT (UK), January 2002
“No Place like Home: Echoes from Kosovo is a powerful, insightful and unsentimental journey into the lives of the inhabitants of a country who have been the unwilling witnesses of war; innocents caught up in a complex political situation, forced to flee their homes to become internally displaced peoples who dream, someday, of returning once more to a normal life; safety, families, friends and neighbours. The reality of which becomes more bleak as the pages reveal the stories, hopes, testimonies and portraits of the individuals who contributed so much to this publication. …A moving testament not only to the survivors, but also to the integrity of the photojournalist and author Melanie Friend who, for over a decade, has been travelling to the Balkans to record (both in photographs and interviews) the events both leading up to the war and the ongoing tensions which still pervade the country.”
THE PROGRESSIVE (USA), June 2002
“…Remarkable…The book is a movable museum. Its fragments cohere into a complex exhibit of individuals overwhelmed by a wave of history.” —Marlene Nadle
$39.95
175 pages
8.5 x 11
ISBN 1-57344-119-8
Current Events / Photography
75 Color Photographs
