Kate Friend was born in the UK. From an early age, her desire to explore set in motion a decade of extreme solo travel – first leaving England for Mongolia at 18 and then on to Beijing, where she lived and studied Chinese. She continued to live and work throughout Asia, with several peripatetic years spent in Japan and Indonesia.
During this time she refined her photographic practice, pursuing projects in New York, Iceland, Indonesia and Tokyo. She created and published her own limited edition arts publication, MOTHER, from 2010 to 2015, which was widely collected and led to various commissions and collaborations with fashion houses including Commes des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Maison Margiela.
Kate’s current botanical still life work has been written about by The New York Times, Wallpaper*, World of Interiors, The Observer and The Financial Times. Her Botanical Portraits series exhibited at the Garden Museum twice, in 2018 and 2021. Kate’s recent botanical series, As Chosen By, showed in part at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in 2021. The second part of the series was exhibited at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in November 2023.
Kate shoots exclusively on film. The final prints are fine art C-types, made using a unique museum-grade printing process, exposing light onto colour paper. The print is then developed and hand-washed using traditional photographic techniques.
Kate’s first monograph, As Chosen By, was published by Ridinghouse and Lyndsey Ingram in September 2023. Kate currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with her partner and their son.