Exploring the Art of Female Friendship: Melissa Schriek
Melissa Schriek Photographs the World Between What Happens and What Could
A disposable camera on a primary school field trip. A girl composing shots, directing classmates, choosing backgrounds with the instinct of someone who already knows. That was where it started for Melissa Schriek — and the instinct has never really changed, only deepened. Now nominated for the prestigious Meijburg Art Commission at Unseen Amsterdam 2024, Schriek has built a practice around female friendship, performative staging, and a particular kind of image that sits exactly on the border between the real and the dreamed. We spoke to her about sisterhood, the boring Dutch landscape she finally fell for, and why her photographs always stop just short of impossible.
There is a word Melissa Schriek keeps returning to when she describes what her photographs are: scenarios. Not staged fabrications, not documentary captures — scenarios. Things that could happen. Situations that carry the texture of reality even when the light is wrong, even when the body is held at an angle that life rarely holds it, even when the space between two women feels charged with something that ordinary photography doesn't usually reach.
This is the territory she has staked out since the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague reoriented her gaze — away from merely portraying reality and toward the sculptural relationship between bodies and the environments they occupy. Dance and gymnastics in her past gave her something most photographers don't have: an understanding of movement as form, of the body as an architectural object in space. She brought that understanding into public environments, into performative staging, into images that feel dreamy without ever fully letting go of the human story underneath.
The surrealist painters are an influence. So are Viviane Sassen and Paul Kooiker. But the deepest research happens, as it always does for the best photographers, in ordinary observation — how people move, dress, interact, the unremarkable choreography of everyday life that turns remarkable the moment someone is paying close enough attention.
ODE is the work that crystallises what Schriek is after. A series built around female friendship, around sisterhood, around the specific and underrepresented reality of what women are to each other when the cameras of mass media aren't framing them as rivals or cautionary tales. She was struck — and the right word is struck, because it implies something landing hard — by how consistently media portrays female bonds as toxic, dramatic, competitive. ODE is the counter-argument made in images: best friends in their natural environments, the power and togetherness that Schriek has always admired and always found inadequately documented.
"I sought to document a different side of friendship, capturing the power and togetherness I have always admired."
The honesty of this is part of what makes the project work. It is not a polemic. It is not a correction delivered from a position of argument. It is, simply, photography that looks at the world it actually sees rather than the world it has been told to expect.
The pandemic, as it did for several artists in this series, produced an unexpected gift wrapped in difficulty. Schriek has never been particularly moved by the Dutch landscape — she has Australian heritage and compares the two with the frankness of someone who grew up hearing what landscape can actually do. Flat, lacking sun, boring. But enforced proximity changed the terms. Suddenly the flatness was the point. The absence of drama forced a different kind of attention, and out of that attention came work that found something in the familiar environment she had been too mobile to see before.
It is a small thing, and also a large one: an artist learning to love what she'd dismissed by being made to stay with it long enough to look properly.
Her creative process holds two things in deliberate tension: experimentation and intuition. She juggles multiple projects simultaneously, pursuing those that resonate rather than those that fit a plan, learning by doing, not fearing failure. The discipline is not in the system but in the attention — staying genuinely open to what each project needs rather than imposing a method onto material that might need something else.
The Meijburg Art Commission nomination at Unseen Amsterdam — announced at Westergasfabriek on 20–22 September 2024, alongside nominees Anna Fabricius, Klaas Kloosterboer, Lee-Ann Olwage, and Gilleam Trapenberg — is recognition of a practice that has been building its own logic quietly and consistently. The award exists to give photography talent the space to develop new work and bring it to a wider audience. Schriek is exactly the kind of artist it was designed for: someone whose best work is already remarkable and whose next direction is genuinely unpredictable.
The disposable camera on the school trip. The girl directing her classmates. She was already doing this. She just needed the time to find out what it was.
Melissa Schriek is a Dutch photographer represented by Hama Gallery. Her work is nominated for the Meijburg Art Commission at Unseen Amsterdam 2024. Discover more artists chosen for how they inspire, not just their visibility, at Antakly Projects.
Melissa Schriek (Hama Gallery, Amsterdam), Lee-Ann Olwage (The Bridge Gallery, Paris), Gilleam Trapenberg (Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam), Klaas Kloosterboer (Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam), Anna Fabricius (TOBE Gallery, Budapest).