Chris Friel was born in Bristol in 1959. Alongside a successful career as a documentary sound recordist for film and television, Friel also worked as a painter. In 2006, in order to photograph his work for an exhibition, Friel acquired an early digital camera and quickly became fascinated with the creative potential of digital photography. He then abandoned painting altogether and dedicated himself to photography, a medium which allowed him the immediacy he craved. Over the last seventeen years, Friel has taken more than two million photographs, experimenting with ever-evolving digital and in-camera techniques. Since 2020, he has begun using AI programs to splice, distort and replicate his own images – a process which the artist says has “changed everything”.
Friel's work has been shown all over the world, including at the South Bank Centre, London, in the Santiago Subway in Chile, and projected behind the London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall. His pictures have been featured in The Times, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone Magazine, to name but a few, and he has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Landscape Photographer of the Year award three times. Friel has collaborated with many other artists: from classical composer, Kevin Kastning, to French post-rock band, Les Discrets, and most recently, the poet, S.J. Finn. His photographs have also appeared on numerous book and album covers.
In 2022, Friel’s exhibition Hypergraphia was one of the largest photographic exhibitions ever held, comprising 150,000 images presented as a series of immersive slideshows. These were accompanied by an original score from British composer, Matthew Herbert.
Friel lives and works in rural Kent.
