Marti Friedlander

Short Biography

Marti Friedlander has had a long career as a photographer. Her subjects have been diverse; portraiture, rural, urban and suburban scenes and encounters, both in New Zealand and other places in which she has lived or visited, such as Israel, Fiji, Tokelau and England, from where she immigrated in 1958. Her photographs of elderly Maori women with moko, artists and writers, vineyards and vintners, and children are particularly well-known, often through the books on which she has worked Moko: the art of Maori tattooing (with Michael King, 1972), Larks in Paradise: New Zealand Portraits (with James McNeish, 1974), Contemporary New Zealand Painters: Volume 1 A – M (with Jim&Mary; Barr, 1980), and Pioneers of New Zealand Wine (wih Dick Scott, 2002), for instance.Her work has been exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the Waikato Art Museum, and in a large and celebrated retrospective at the Auckland Art Gallery in 2001, which then toured the country. Shirley Horrocks’ film, Marti: the Passionate Eye, attracted a lot of attention both at the International Film Festivals in New Zealand in 2004 and on local television. Recognition of her work came with the award of the CNZM in 1998. Most recently (June 2005) she has had a joint exhibition, She said, with Deborah Smith at Auckland’s John Leech Gallery.