©Amy Friend, Book Cover Firelight, published by L’Artiere

As a long time friend and fan of the work and person of artist Amy Friend, I was delighted to not only reunite with her at Paris Photo, but also have a chance to see her new monograph, Firelight published by L’Artiere. It it is a unique book design created for unique work. The book sits in a blue box, presented as a gift to open and fill us with wonder.

Firelight is a captivating photographic collection that breathes new life into vintage photographs from the 1920s to the 1940s. Sourced from family albums, online finds, and market discoveries, these images are reimagined through Friend’s artistic vision. The series, titled “Dare alla Luce”—Italian for “to bring to the light”—embodies a dual meaning of illumination and birth. By introducing delicate perforations and backlighting, Friend transforms these historical moments into ethereal scenes where figures and landscapes are adorned with luminous patterns, evoking a sense of magic and nostalgia. This interplay of light and shadow invites viewers to reflect on the transient nature of time, memory, and existence. Firelight is presented in a meticulously crafted volume, featuring laser-cut paper and French binding, all encased in a clothbound box. This edition is a testament to the fusion of past and present, art and artifact.

An interview with the artist follows.

©Amy Friend, Book Cover Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Friend shares about the book: Firelight extends my ongoing dialogue with photography – bringing together images that dwell in the shifting space between what is seen and what flickers just beyond reach. 

This limited edition release includes a text by curator Laura Serani, whose thoughtful reflections add depth and resonance to the work. Design by Gianni Giulianelli. After the sold-out first publication, Stardust, I am pleased that my continued revisiting of this work has found its way out there.

L’Artiere has established a reputation for creating some of the most exceptional photobooks internationally, and I am honoured to collaborate with them once again.

©Amy Friend, Book Cover Firelight, published by L’Artiere

©Amy Friend, Spread from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Amy Friend is a Canadian artist working across photography, installation, and community-based collaboration. Her process-driven practice investigates personal and collective histories through material and metaphor, engaging themes of time, land-memory, dust, oceans, and humanity’s relationship to the universe.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including L’épreuve de la Matière at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), Paris Photo, Gexto Photo Festival (Spain), the Onassis Cultural Center (Greece), DongGang Photography Museum (South Korea), GuatePhoto (Guatemala), Photoville (New York), and institutions such as Museum London and Rodman Hall (Canada), incamera galerie and Meymac Centre d’art contemporain (France), Mosteiro de Tibães at Encontros da Imagem (Portugal), and the Abbaye de Silvacane (France). Friend’s work has been featured in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, California Sunday Magazine, GUP Magazine, LUX, EKI Magazine, and more…  She has also been named a Top 50 photographer in the Critical Mass Photo Competition multiple times. She is currently working on a new project bringing her to the water’s edge again.

Friend is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Brock University in Niagara, Canada.

©Amy Friend, Mom’s Roses, Yesterday is Today, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography…

I grew up on the outskirts of Windsor, Ontario, a Canadian border town across from Detroit, Michigan. At the end of my street was a beach where Lake St. Clair meets the Detroit River. I was raised in a small, predominantly immigrant neighbourhood, and my Italian, Scottish, and Norwegian heritage played a significant role in shaping my identity. With those roots came a wealth of stories from the past.

Creativity ran through my family in different ways. My Italian grandfather built a completely round house where I spent much of my childhood. It was an extraordinary space that invited imagination and play. My mother was always documenting our lives, first with Super 8 film, footage I later incorporated into my own work. When I reflect on my practice, I see how these early influences continue to inform it. I often respond to personal experience, and materials from my family archive have served as a springboard for both my ideas and methodologies.

I began my formal education as a painter, but once I encountered analogue photography, and later digital photography, I was hooked. Even so, the tactile, hands-on aspect of making remains essential to my studio practice.

In the end the beginnings are our world…farmland, lakes, stories…it all makes sense that this is what I draw from.

©Amy Friend, Mom’s Roses, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Congratulations on the new book! Is it a sequel to your first monograph with L’Artiere, Stardust?

Yes, it is, although I hadn’t originally planned to continue the Dare alla Luce series. Still, I found myself drawn back to the vernacular imagery that shaped the earlier work. That pull led to Firelight, which feels like a natural evolution of the first book, yet distinct in tone and presence.

©Amy Friend, Nana, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Can you share more about the book’s design?

The design closely echoes the first monograph and preserves a strong sense of visual continuity. However, Firelight introduces subtle shifts, most notably in the deep blue of the boxed cover and in many of the photographs, which carry expanded shades of blue reminiscent of the hottest part of a flame. Afterall – it is when we gather long enough around the fire that the deep stories emerge.

The pages are perforated, referencing the gestures and processes that shaped the original series. As light passes through the pages these perforations activate the paper and introduce depth, translucency, and illumination into the printed image. The viewer is complicit in the act of revealing light as the pages are turned.

I am deeply grateful to the team at L’Artiere and to Gianni Giulianelli for the design. The formation of the book was built on immense trust and collaboration. Laura Serani curated the images and opens the book with her poignant writing. This shared approach is my preferred way of working because I learn so much from the perspectives and responses of others.

An important component of the book are the titles – listed at the end. They open additional possibilities within the images. Some draw from notations found on the original photographs, while others are crafted to reflect on photography, memory, and possibility.

©Amy Friend, Offerings, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

©Amy Friend, Silver and Coal, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Where do you source your photographs–are they family photographs?

 I typically use found photographs purchased from antique markets and online sources –although this book carries special meaning because I included two photos from my own family. One is my father and the other is my brother – We lost both of them two years ago. It felt important to include them in this book that I consider a type of “anonymous family album” a collection of lives. My own (their own) being a part of that now. The title has many interpretations, but I think of this title not only referencing light but also the idea of gathering around a fire – gathering around the ever shifting firelight. Something I did as a child with my family many times. I think we see ourselves in the images of others – whether we see parts of our lives that differ or align photographs are a measure of understating of life…among so many other things.

©Amy Friend, So Many Dramatic Sunsets, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

What propelled you to add the “stardust” of speckled light?

 Childhood – dreams – being elsewhere – magic – all that is inexplicable – the out-there-ness of life and beyond – the invisible –… the majestic moments of taking in a starlit sky…

Stars – are akin to photos – there but not there… we see the past.

We are made of stars – we also burn bright long after we leave this place…

©Amy Friend, That Was Her As A Child, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Your work has inspired so many artists, can you share a bit about your newest process of using salt water to evoke memory?

First – it is heartening to read your words, that my work has inspired others.

To the questions – I have never been interested in what I think of as a “concrete photograph” – an image that functions purely as a fixed record of reality. For me, the photograph has always felt incomplete in that role. I am drawn instead to its instability, to its potential to shift, dissolve, and become something else.  I believe photography inherently carries a tension: it is tethered to the real, yet it is also fundamentally unreal. It is always already a representation of the past, a trace of something that has slipped away. That slippage fascinates me.

The medium itself is also alchemical, almost magical and I aim to work with that through my own processes. When I begin the processes emerge from the photographs themselves and I have recognized that when I leave an image untouched, I feel something essential is missing.

In the Dare alla Luce series, light functions both materially and metaphorically – as exposure, revelation, and transformation. Light is not simply illumination; it is a reminder of our cosmic origins. We are, quite literally, composed of stardust. The elements that make up our bodies were forged in stars. That awareness shifts how I think about photography. Light connects us to something vast and ancient, something beyond the immediate frame of the image.

In the ongoing Tiny Tears works, the process became more tactile. Over many years I photographed waterscapes in different locations, returning again and again to the horizon line, a space of distance, longing, and ambiguity. As I began bringing these images together, I found myself thinking not just about the image of water, but about the embodied experience of it.

We are made of salt and water. Our tears carry salt. Our blood contains it. Our bodies are composed largely of water. There is a deep resonance between the sea and the human body –  both materially and metaphorically. Collecting seawater and allowing it to dry directly onto the surface of the prints became a way of collapsing representation and presence. The salt crystallizes unpredictably, marking the image with the physical trace of the water itself. In this way, the photograph does not simply depict memory; it holds a material echo of it.

Finally, salt is a part of photography’s chemistry, just as light is. By reintroducing salt water onto the surface, I am returning to the medium’s origins while also destabilizing it. The photograph is no longer just an image of the past; it becomes a living surface, porous and vulnerable, carrying residue, erosion, and transformation. In both Dare alla Luce and the Tiny Tears series, I am interested in this interconnection – how light binds us to the cosmos, how salt and water bind us to the earth, sea and to each other. The photograph becomes a threshold between these realms, a place where nothing is fixed, but continually forming and dissolving.

©Amy Friend, The Ship’s Song, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

Who or what inspires you?

I often respond to this question by saying I am inspired the way a magpie gathers – drawn to fragments, glimmers, and traces. Inspiration arrives from many places such as the songs by Nick Cave and Lhasa de Sela, the ache of novel – The Time Traveller’s Wife, the Staglieno Cemetary in Genoa, fireside conversations, travel, stories upon stories, lakes, seas, the silence between words. I find inspiration in the stars and in the mud, in Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the colour blue, in the work of many other artists, and in the act of meeting people and listening deeply.

My inspiration list shifts as I too move along in this life. I have found much hope with those in the creative community.

One aspect of inspiration is the act of play – about experimentation without a fixed outcome. I began as a painter, and I still hold close the idea of touch, of mutability, of materials that can be pushed, layered, and transformed. That sensibility carries into my photographic work. I also think we need to take ourselves a little less seriously and dig into the world with chance and play so that we can connect with the work afresh… there is just so much to discover.

©Amy Friend, Their Still Life, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere

©Amy Friend, The Coast and all the Pearls, from Firelight, published by L’Artiere