Marti Friedlander | Starting Point of a Complicated Story
01.08 - 14.09
Marti Friedlander (1928-2016) had an almost sixty year career in New Zealand. She arrived from England in early 1958 and was taking photographs until shortly before her death.
From the early 1960s on she became one of the best-known and most celebrated photographers here; her work reproduced in periodicals and books and exhibited ever more widely, especially after the Auckland Art Gallery-organised retrospective in 2001, which toured the country. Most of the photographs in this exhibition come from the 1960s and 1970s, with a good number of them included in her Larks in a Paradise (1974, with texts by James McNeish). Except for two, a New York street scene and Beersheva Festival, Israel, they are all New Zealand subjects. And those subjects are diverse – city, suburban, small town, rural and one ‘wilderness’ (Mitre Peak Milford Sound), various kinds of protests and demonstrations, work and ceremonies, as well as their equally diverse human inhabitants and participants. Larks in a Paradise was subtitled New Zealand Portraits, and while it did include literal portraits of individuals, it was more portraits of aspects of New Zealand society and manners of living and being here, as perceived by a still relatively recent immigrant from the other side of the world and a very different cultural background from the vast majority of subjects – sharp-eyed, exploratory views of the places and people she found herself in and among by an outsider aiming to come inside. Creative outsiders can often see a society and its people in ways insiders cannot or don’t want to. In short, they open eyes to what had not been represented before, or what had only been half seen. That was, and is, so with Marti Friedlander’s pictures, not all of which make comfortable viewing. For instance, consider Mt Eden, Auckland (1969), featuring three small girls facing the camera, with a brick and tile house behind them. The cropping brings the girls awkwardly close to the viewer, so that the space seems askew. The middle girl’s fingers touch nervously. The one on the right picks at the hem of her dress, while the left girl’s dress has dropped round her elbows, leaving stiff, as if bound. Domestic order is unsettled. What could be a commonplace scene takes on an edgy emotional load. Marti Friedlander’s photographs of children were often penetrating psychologically.
There is also wit, warmth and empathy in Friedlander’s imagings of experiences, as in the her photographs of children at play, farmers, and the Turangawaewae Marae Jubilee (1971), for instance. Rather than formulaic, her subjects are often ‘improbable’, things seen anew, as in Kumeu (1971) – a bisected house atop a trailer, puncturing the ordinary and expected, as if it had strayed from an avant-garde art installation. The American sculptor. Gordon Matta Clark’s (1943-1978), ‘building cuts’ – houses sawn through, sections removed – were still to come, 1972 onwards.
Marti Friedlander’s photographs work through suggestion, rather than by preaching or declaiming, especially when the subjects touch on the complexities of New Zealand’s social history. Consider Retired Couple (1969), for example – a bland title, just a statement of fact, but the immediate surfaces of suburban appearances can be superficial. How Marti Friedlander presents this couple implies a narrative of resilience. They belong to a generation that weathered depression and war, as well as the impacts of governmental social welfare and state housing programmes, which enabled increasing, even if modest for most, prosperity after the war and during the 1950s and 1960s. This couple, their arms intertwined, so close to one another as to be one, stand before their neat and tidy house and property. They look back at the photographer, and now us, differently, He smiles, she is sceptical. Their faces speak of experience, hard-earned independence and depth of feeling. We are both near to them and separated from them by the diagonal cut of the low wall. Touch, both emotional and bodily, and its connotations are integral to this photograph and Marti Friedlander’s portraits generally. She was touched by this couple and sought to express or visualise her response. .Friedlander’s photographs often probe beyond surfaces and visualise social and psychological conditions, ambivalences and ambiguities, which might be difficult to articulate otherwise. You need to look closely not just at what she photographed, but also, and crucially, at how she pictured her subjects. Each photograph in this exhibition could be the starting point of a complicated story – as the best photographs are.
Leonard Bell
References: his Marti Friedlander (2009) and Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists (2020), both published by Auckland University Press.
Leonard Bell discusses Marti Friedlander, 5pm, 14 Sept:
Associate Professor Leonard Bell from the University of Auckland’s art history department will give a talk on Marti Friedlander to round off the exhibition. Bell is an expert on Friedlander’s photography and the author of several key publications about her practice. Join us at Starkwhite Queenstown, 1 Earl Street, 5pm on Saturday 14 September.