Image: Melanie Friend

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The police kept shouting, “Better surrender, otherwise we will roast you like a pig and use your skin to make pockets.” My father was shouting back, “Kosova Republic,” “Never die Albania”…then the police began to beat up the children and to hold them in front of them so my father couldn’t fire. Then he started to talk to me and said, “If the bullet hits me from the back, then you may cry for me, because I’ll feel that I have handed over Kosova to Serbia. If the bullet hits me from the front, in my chest, then I don’t want any of you to cry for me.” —from Homes and Gardens (London: Camerawork, 1996)

After visiting Kosovo several times as a journalist, Melanie Friend returned in October 1994 to talk again to the people who had been subject to the Serbian regime’s “slow-motion ethnic cleansing.” Struck by the contrast of sitting in “reassuring and tranquil” living rooms and “hearing tales of torture,” she began a project that documents the “invisible trauma” of living in a police state. Pairing survivors’ graphic testimony about human rights abuses with images of where that violence took place, Friend illustrates the transformation of the most domestic spaces into the most sinister. Her work will be exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography from September 18 to November 1.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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