Kate Friend

Kate Friend was born in the UK. Escaping provincial England, she left for Mongolia at 18, then continued on to Beijing, where she lived and studied Chinese. She refined her photographic practice, spending several peripatetic years taking commissions in New York, Japan and Indonesia. Driven by a love of print, Kate published MOTHER, a limited-edition arts journal, from 2010 to 2015. The journal was widely collected and led to collaborations with fashion houses including Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, and Maison Margiela.

Kate’s botanical work has featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Wallpaper*, The World of Interiors, The Financial Times and The British Journal of Photography. Her first series of Botanical Portraits showed at the Garden Museum in 2018. Kate’s second series As Chosen By showed in two parts at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery: the first in 2021 and the second in 2023. Kate’s first monograph, As Chosen By, was published by Ridinghouse and Lyndsey Ingram in September 2023. In 2025 Kate showed her most recent series, There Are Always Flowers For Those Who Want To See Them. An accompanying publication was released by Ridinghouse and Lyndsey Ingram in 2025.

Kate’s work will feature in the major new exhibition In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World at the Ashmolean Museum in 2026.

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 currently lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with her partner and their son.