The photojournalist Melanie Friend spent a month travelling in China on her own in 1986, when the country seemed to be opening up to visitors and change. She was 28 and had planned for the trip a long time in advance – seven months of night school classes in Mandarin – but nothing quite prepared her for the place she encountered. “In the cities they were used to seeing western students and so on, but in other places it was very unusual. I met with a lot of curiosity – and a great deal of friendliness.”
Such was the interest in the emerging China at the time that Friend, a freelancer, had commitments from various publications – the Economist, the Times – to publish whatever she came back with. The commissions gave her time to explore. “Early on,” she says, “I sat on my own in a hotel room and it was a bit bleak, so I resolved to get out and hire a bike, and cycle the back streets. That is when I started having these great spontaneous encounters with people.”
A new, short book of Friend’s China photographs is alive with that kind of serendipity. Her pictures capture the first advertising billboards on Chinese streets competing with government slogans. Bicycles still dominate newly constructed highways. Old men play backstreet games of Xiangqi; kids read comic books. Friend took this image in a restaurant in Shanghai, where she had been having lunch. At a neighbouring table a couple were celebrating their wedding. “I saw this little joyful gathering going on,” she recalls now, “and I went and introduced myself in my stumbling language. They seemed to be really delighted at the idea of a picture. When I look at that photograph, it brings back all these very warm memories of so many of those encounters.”
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China, 1986 by Melanie Friend is published by Cafe Royal Books