Arieanne Evans also known as FRIENDSONFILM is a Durham, North Carolina native attending Spelman College. She also happens to be a cancer with a dynamic eye to capture people and her surroundings. Arieanne is a black women in photography that is re-representing black stories and normalizing the authenticity and truth that comes from within them. When asked where she got her brand name she responded with “FRIENDSONFILM comes from the fact that I consider all of the people that I take a picture of a friend. There is a certain intimacy and comfortability that I strive for in my pictures that can only come from friendship.” Only getting into photography a year ago, she has had an amazing year producing beautiful content. Her journey began when she met a fellow cancer, Zanele Muholi, who was featured in an exhibition at Spelman and had an intimate conversation. She said, “They came to the museum to talk to us during a class I was taking that semester and I was saying how I knew that I wanted to take pictures because pictures have always been one of the things that I’ve been fascinated with since I was a kid and that I was thinking about taking pictures myself but that I didn’t know where to start and they told me ‘Just buy a camera and start,’ so I did.” Since then she has been taking the photography world by storm. On her website “FRIENDSONFIM” she has multiple collections she has completed in the past year. One of her inspirations is Travis Scott’s personal photographer @Raycorruptuedmind on Instagram. “He inspires me on the daily and is one of the main reason why I started photography in the first place. His work, his life, and his inspirational tweets and quotes push me to be a better person and in turn a better artist.” She stated. Her collection, “REFLECTIONS” happens to be one of her favorites because she got to dig through the Spelman archives and go through all the history and recreate them.
Being a student at Spelman College has helped influence her work a great deal. She stated that sometimes she happens to forget things but she loves the feeling of being nostalgic, so with her creating stories she gets to remember. Every moment for her is frozen in time and she loves that. When asked what the hardest thing about her medium was, she responded with, “The rules and techniques of the camera, it’s much more complex than I thought it would be. You would think that shooting in automatic would get you your best picture but that it’s absolutely incorrect. It will get you mediocre pictures at best. Manual is where it’s at, but learning differences between different lighting situations, correct shutter speeds and aperture sizes, and then applying it all when you’re in the middle of a photo shoot? Very stressful, but definitely all worth it in the end.” In 2020 she has big plans. With graduation on the horizon she also wants to “become more conceptual with [her] work during this upcoming year. [she wants] to learn from, be inspired by, and pull from the greats a little more than before. [she’s] honing in on [her] overall aesthetic for [her] work and now [she wants] to be able to incorporate art histories and references into [her] concepts for shoots so that there’s more meaning behind what [she’s] creating.”
You can view more of her work and learn more about her at her website https://www.friendsonfilm.photography
All images provided by FRIENDSONFILM