[ALST-L] NEW BOOK ON KOSOVO

[Fdcleis at aol.com]

No Place Like Home
Echoes from Kosovo
By Melanie Friend

Current Events/Photography
CONTACT: Frédérique Delacoste
In the U.S:  (415) 575-4700 or FDCLEIS at aol.com
Publication Dates: November 1, 2001 in U.S.
                   November 15, 2001 in the U.K.


"The power of No Place Like Home 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." — GRANTA

Midnight Editions is pleased to announce publication of 
No Place Like Home: Echoes from Kosovo.

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.

British photojournalist Melanie Friend has covered the Balkans since 1989. 
Well before Kosovo began to make headlines, she was gripped by the region, 
whose autonomy was revoked by the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan 
Milosevic that same year. Friend became familiar with the tactics of the 
Serbian police, who spread fear through the predominantly Albanian Muslim 
population. Her visits were brief, often subject to surveillance and film 
confiscation.

"Everyone had a story to tell, but it wasn’t always easy to find publishable 
newspaper photographs," Friend writes in the introduction to No Place Like 
Home. "Repression was hidden, dramatic visual images rare. Police frequently 
cordoned off whole villages in the aftermath of police raids and beatings. 
How could you visually represent fear and repression in picturesque villages 
where roadblocks and surveillance of foreigners’ movements made it impossible 
to witness such events? 
 I wanted to try a different strategy from 
straightforward photojournalism. I began photographing the rooms and gardens 
where police raids had taken place." Friend conducted taped interviews with 
the inhabitants of those rooms and gardens.

In 1999, when thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled large-scale reprisals and 
killings of civilians by the Serbian police and paramilitaries in the wake of 
the NATO bombings, Friend traveled to Macedonia and interviewed refugees. "I 
knew I could not photograph nameless people crying as they streamed across 
the border on tractors, as in so many newspaper images I had seen. These 
pictures may have been necessary, but I could not bring myself to take them," 
she writes. 

Instead, Friend took dignified studio-style portraits of refugees. Later, 
when the refugees returned to Kosovo, she sought out and re-interviewed all 
the people she had met in the refugee camps in Macedonia. In some cases, she 
had only the name of a village for an address. She visited massacre sites in 
Recak, Lubizhde, and Celine, where Albanian survivors walked with her through 
beautiful landscapes, now haunted by the memories of those who were killed 
there. She also interviewed Serbs, Roma, Turks, and other minorities, who, 
fearing revenge killings, did not wish to be photographed for publication.

Melanie Friend’s photographs and interviews span the past decade and offer a 
profound and original look at repression, war and its aftermath, and their 
effect on the lives of ordinary citizens. No Place Like Home not only "shows 
us the human particularity that lies within phrases such as ‘ethnic conflict’ 
and ‘civil war’ " (Ian Jack, Granta), "it enriches our knowledge of Kosovo 
and inspires deeper reflection about the wider Balkans"(Gabriel Partos, BBC 
World Service).


ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NO PLACE LIKE HOME

"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, GRANTA

 "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, BBC WORLD SERVICE

"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, THE HASSELBLAD CENTER

Melanie Friend’s work has appeared in NEWSWEEK, THE GUARDIAN, THE 
INDEPENDENT, GRANTA, 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 are 
currently showing at the Hasselblad Center in Sweden. She lives in London.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME: ECHOES FROM KOSOVO by Melanie Friend
Current Events/Photography
75 Color Photos, 10x11, 160 pages, Midnight Editions.
ISBN 1-57344-119-8
U.S. Price: $39.95
U.K. Price: 30 Pounds Sterling


TO ORDER IN U.S. CALL 1-800-780-2279 or email:fdcleis at aol.com
TO ORDER IN U.K. CALL 020-8829-3000 or email: orders at turnaround-uk.com