Melissa Schriek is a dutch photographer. She graduated from the photography departement of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Since then she has worked on multiple personal projects such as The City is a Choreography, and commissioned works for various brands. She explores relationships between individuals and their environment through both observation and staging. Her work is often created with a performative approach, aesthetically and conceptually exploring the border between staged and documentary photography. She perceives the camera as a powerful tool where fact and fiction can work together to explore modern, social issues.
Ultimately she wants her work to raise questions and about how we relate to one another and our personal environment.
About ODE: an exploration of the dynamics of female friendship – words by Melissa Schriek:
One of the reasons I started ODE was to, quite literally, give an ode to sisterhood and female friendship. I’ve been amazed by the power and togetherness of women my whole life and continue to be so. Especially the bond and connection that I often feel and see between women has been important to me. It struck me that this bond is often represented in (popular) media as ‘toxic’, dramatic or hostile. Or there is even no attention for female friendship at all… I wanted to create a document of photographs that would show a different side of friendship, without losing honesty. I’ve been photographing couples of best friends, twenty-five so far and still going, on the streets and in their homes to try to explore the dynamics of female friendship and capture what that may look like.
