An Hour with Marti Friedlander

Written by Rachel Ogier

An Hour With Marti Friedlander chaired by Len Bell

Reading the Portrait

Marti Friedlander sold out the smallish NZI room, and for good reason.  With a body of work stretching back half a century, her photographs have touched many people’s lives and for many different reasons.

The most famous images from Friedlander’s fifty-year long practice show a time when this country was struggling to find an identity distinct from Britain.  In reference to this Friedlander said  “I’m glad I’ve created a body of work which captures fifty years of New Zealand history".  Drive and talent are a big part of Friedlander’s success but another part, she acknowledged, stemmed from being in “the right place at the right time".

Her life and work are detailed in the book Marti Friedlander by art historian and chair of the  session Len Bell.

Unlike any of the other events I attended, this one made use of visual aids.  Friedlander’s photographs were stunning in large scale, their feeling of intimacy only increased by the larger format.  Bell noted that “so much can be said in a still photograph” and to explicate this he focused on Freidlander’s portraits of artists and writers.

A portrait, said Friedlander, is “the essence of a person… my work has always been about trying to get to the essence of things".

Friedlander’s first published portrait was of author Maurice Gee.  At the time Gee was an unknown, and just so happened to live with his mother next door to the Friedlander’s.  The friendship was important to her as Friedlander struggled with the shift from 1960s London to 1960s Auckland.  “There must be young people in the audience who have no idea what pioneers we all were in those days".

Friedlander made a concentrated effort to document “artists and writers who were unrecognised", hoping both to give them some much-needed publicity and to show New Zealanders the wealth of creativity in this country.

Friedlander talked a little bit about the technical aspect to her art.  She never uses anything but available light, “it’s freed me up tremendously", she said.  “I’m not hindered by tripods or lighting effects or anything like that… I’ve never used a studio situation”.  Taking photos on film and developing many of her most famous shots herself is a very different process to snapping a digital pic.  Friedman thinks that one day we will turn away from digital photography and head back to the darkroom. Personally, I think expecting everyone to give up their digicams and turn back to film is about as likely as everyone giving up their cell phones and mp3 players in favour of the telegraph and gramophone.  Yet Friedman is right to say that “black and white has something over colour".

Bell pointed out the portraits are “paradoxical events - they both reveal and conceal” and however much they show, “something always remains unknowable“. Friedlander noted that “there is an act going on between photographer and subject… everybody you photograph takes a part‘. Friedlander encourages this playacting, “I don’t believe in taking unguarded snapshots".  By allowing the subject to pose, they are “either hiding or revealing something of their personality”.

Friedlander doesn’t use props in her photos. “I want simplicity,” she said. “The simple portrait, in the long run, is the one that lasts.” A portrait of Maurice Duggan in 1965 is shown on screen. Friedlander said she has “tremendous respect” for the people she photographs and takes a minute to tell us about Duggan. The photo was taken in Taupo over Easter weekend; she wanted a series of photos which made him out to be a Hemmingway. The photograph, said Friedlander, “is about the writer but also the man behind the writer - the person.” But “you cannot in one portrait get every facet of a person”.

We look at four or five photos of Duggan on a boat on Lake Taupo before turning to a shot, taken in 1971, which shows Duggan looking sad. He was in advertising at that point, explained Friedlander, and we mutter sympathetically. Len comments that he looks sad around the eyes, and as an audience, we all spend a minute looking into the eyes of a sad man, long-dead, described as one of New Zealand's greatest exponents of short fiction.

There is “an element of sadness in every portrait,” said Friedlander. The freezing of time for a moment, recording an instant of history is a kind of a fight against mortality. After all, “all of us will one day be only a photograph“.  She pauses, then laughs, “so it may as well be an interesting photograph”.