Profiles

From the Archive: Photo Review Feb/Mar 2003:

New Zealand has been giving long overdue recognition to one of its finest photographers, Marti Friedlander. A retrospective exhibition of 150 of her black-and-white ‘instants kept open to scrutiny' - selected from more than 50,000 taken over 40 years - has been touring the country in conjunction with the publication of the book Marti Friedlander: Photographs.

The image chosen for the book cover and exhibition poster is appropriately iconic and says a lot about her work. It's probably the most hackneyed pictorial subject in New Zealand - a flock of sheep on a misty country road - and yet Friedlander managed to elevate it to another level. The seemingly ethereal sheep confront the photographer with their gaze and, for an exquisitely frozen moment, everyone gets to feel uncomfortable. It's not about sheep and the landscape; it's about relationships. Printed across the poster is ‘What are you looking at?'

Friedlander's photos ask a lot of questions, and not usually concerning sheep. ‘However understated, they can be seen to be about the nature of peoples' being in various places, with their attendant ambivalences, tensions, certainties and uncertainties,' critic Leonard Bell wrote in an essay about her, entitled Narratives of Loss and Hope.

‘Friedlander's eye is a thinking eye - subtle, nuanced, and quietly complicating, not hectoring, lapel-grabbing or histrionic. For all their apparent literal realism, her photographs imply the problematics of identity and peoples' relationships to the places they inhabit. That is, rather than just showing "us""what we look like", these photographs ask us questions - not necessarily easy ones to answer.'

New Zealand is lucky to have a photographer like this, because it was only by chance. She was born Martha Gordon, to Russian Jewish refugee parents who fled to London's East End. When her father disappeared and her infirm mother could no longer support her and her sister, the children were taken into state care. Friedlander has said she felt loved and cherished growing up. When the time came, she thought about studying dress design, but went for photography instead.

In 1946 she started work as a printer, retoucher and assistant to expatriate Kiwi Douglas Glass at his studio in London's Kensington. He couldn't pay much - she lived in a bedsit - but Glass,who did portraits for the Sunday Times and assignments for Life, and liked very low natural light, greatly valued Friedlander's immediate talent for printing. He wrote years later that she was the only person who could ‘print from a blank negative'. Then she met Gerrard Friedlander, a blond, mountain-climbing, New Zealand dentist.

They married and a year later, in 1958, returned to his homeland. The locals were friendly but reserved.

‘I was regarded as that ubiquitous Kiwi outsider - the Pom. I was not seen as Jewish because New Zealanders had no sense of what being Jewish meant,' she told the Otago Daily Times when her exhibition, curated by the Auckland Art Gallery, reached Dunedin this year. She felt free from stereotype, unconstrained - and confronted by a whole new landscape. Working as Gerrard's dental nurse in rural Auckland, she found that her camera helped her negotiate the wider world.

It has often been said that there is a ‘Europeanness' about Friedlander's photos, which wouldn't be surprising. But perhaps it was initially more the sensitivity of an outsider to difference and ‘otherness'. She was able to see things about the locals that they couldn't see about themselves (and now delight in recognising).

Stepping up from a Brownie Box camera to a Voigtlander reflex, Friedlander was soon getting published as a documentary photographer. She travelled the country shooting small vintners for Wine Review and captured the social protest movements of the 1960s in which she was often also a participant. Her passion for civil rights and respect for indigenous peoples involved her with Maoris and Pacific Islanders, feminists, shearers, and the young settlers in the formative state of Israel.

Many New Zealanders got to know of her through her now classic photos for Michael King's 1972 book Moko: The Art of Maori Tattooing. ‘It was my most rewarding assignment,' she said. ‘These women reminded me of the matriarchs of my youth. They had this incredible dignity, self-confidence and sense of identity. Although I only spoke a couple of words of Maori,we got on amazingly well.'

And King has said: ‘Working with Marti was an amazing experience. She is filled with optimism and boundless energy. She is Jewish and I thought the cultural gap may have been too wide. I was wrong.'

Friedlander also took to portraying notable Kiwi artists and writers in their own environments, sometimes creating what have become the definitive pictures of them. Leonard Bell commented: ‘It has been frequently argued that photography as a medium is by its very nature appropriative; that it inevitably involves the photographer taking something from the subjects, to the extent even of objectifying and "possessing" them. Indeed there has been a lot of photography like this.

‘However . . . in this respect Marti Friedlander's work is exemplary. Her photographs elicit a sense of the fundamental individual personhood of her subjects,whether they are identified by name or unidentified, single or in crowds . . . Crucial to these encounters with faces is the photographer's role as a witness; encounters in which her own place and identity are explored and questioned as much as those of her subjects.'

Which brings us back to those sheep.

Our thanks to Auckland Art Gallery, which supplied the images for this article. Marti Friedlander: Photographs (Godwit, NZ$60) is available through the gallery (PO Box 5449, Auckland, New Zealand; phone: 64 9 307 7700 ) or its website (www.akcity.govt.nz\artgallery\).

 See Photo Review magazine Issue 9 for the print edition of this profile which includes additional images.

To subscribe or order back issue(s):
1. Click here to pay online by credit card, or
2. Order by phone   (02) 9948 8600  (02) 9948 8600    (02) 9948 8600  (02) 9948 8600 , or
3. Mail or fax - click here

To see more photographer profiles, click here