Marti Friedlander turned an outsider’s eye on the countrysides of Aotearoa.
“When you’re born in a land you become blind to it. You no longer see the beauties within.” – Daniel K. Brown, School of Design, Victoria University
The sheep seem to know something. Some are minding their own business, but most, ears perked, eyes up, are staring straight at the camera. They take up most of the light-dappled dirt road. Despite a cloud of rising dust, the distinctive features of each animal’s face are visible, and each looks lost in its own distinctive thoughts. Just like us.
Marti Friedlander was one of Aotearoa’s most important and impactful photographers, and ‘Eglinton Valley, 1970’ is probably her most well-known image. As art historian Leonard Bell, author of Marti Friedlander (2009) and Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists (2020), told me, “it seems to have an extraordinary, almost magical, effect on people.”
A complicated story
Born in England, when Friedlander immigrated to New Zealand in the fifties she brought with her an outsider’s eye; it was one she turned, through shutter and lens, onto aspects of her adopted country that had previously been relegated to the realm of the ordinary, and thus made invisible. This is the power of ‘Eglinton Valley, 1970’. She saw art in the everyday, including sheep.
More than 30 of Friedlander’s original silver gelatin prints were recently showcased in the ‘Starting Point of a Complicated Story’ exhibition at Starkwhite’s galleries in both Auckland and Tāhuna Queenstown. A survey of her photographic career, all except two of the images in the exhibition are of New Zealand subjects, and though many date to the 1960s and 1970s, they still feel fresh. Bell puts it like this: “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.”
The photos cover a range of topics that chronicle the tenor of a culture that was changing and of a national identity that was emerging. She said the first proper New Zealand image she took was at a 1960 gathering in Auckland’s Myers Park protesting the All Blacks tour to South Africa, and she went on to chronicle anti-Vietnam War rallies, the United Women’s Convention and nuclear disarmament marches. Her photo from the 1960 Springbok Tour Protest, featuring a banner that says “I’m All White, Jack”, has become an almost-meme for the social revolutions of the post war years. Friedlander’s ‘Moko suite’ images of Māori kuia – women like Waikato kuia Herepo Rongo and Rauwha Tamaiparea from Parihaka – were originally taken for the historian Michael King’s 1972 book Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century. The project aimed to record what was then (wrongly) assumed to be the last generation of women to carry the moko kauae; she later gifted the photos to the national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa.
Then there are her famous portraits of artists and writers like Ralph Hotere, Maurice Gee and Rita Angus. As she explained in Shirley Horrocks’ 2004 documentary Marti: The Passionate Eye, she sensed she was “living in a place where artists were not seen”, and she wanted to change that. “It seemed to me that artists were struggling for recognition. I resolved to photograph as many of them as I could,” she wrote. Much later, Neil and Tim Finn hired Friedlander to do the shoot for the Everyone is Here album cover.
The images I love most, though, are Friedlander’s renderings of the rural and the remote, and for this reason the Queenstown setting for the exhibition feels especially fitting. The photos feel revelatory, both for the time, and for now. There are pubs, livestock, shearers, houses, fences, freezing works, auctioneers, and landscapes too, but framed nothing like the scenic wonderlands hawked in the tourism posters of her time, or the Instagram posts of ours.
Yellow stockings and things like that
The story of how Friedlander ended up in the Eglinton Valley in 1970 starts in 1919, when her Russian-Jewish parents, Sophie and Philip, fled the Kiev pogroms of the Russian Civil War and ended up in London’s Mile End. Born in 1928, she had scant time with her parents, who placed and her sister in an orphanage when she was three years old. She spent much of her childhood in a Jewish orphanage, the Norwood Orphan Aid Asylum, which she credited in her memoir, Self-Portrait (2013) with saving her life by providing the secure environment and proper medical care she would not have had access to in poverty-stricken East London.
After war broke out in 1939, Friedlander was evacuated to Worthing, East Sussex, where she won a trade scholarship. She was interested in studying sewing, but the course was full, so she was offered photography instead. (“What’s that?” she asked at the time.) Her photographic education began at the Bloomsbury Technical School for Girls where she learned the very practical basics: retouching negatives, making developers and fixers, printing. She then spent a year at the more “bohemian” Camberwell School of Art in South London.
By the end of the 1940s, she was working as a photographic assistant, initially for the Sunday Times’ Douglas Glass, then with Gordon Crocker, a leading fashion photographer. It was an exceptional apprenticeship; Friedlander called Crocker a “totally dedicated” photographer who was “meticulous”. Over the course of the next decade she became highly-skilled, and the admiration became mutual; Bell notes that Glass “famously observed that she could produce an image from a blank negative.”
A photograph changed her life in 1956, when a friend came by her bedsit with an album that contained a snap of four lads reclining on the grass during a tramping trip in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. One of them, a tall blonde guy, stood out. “I had pointed to Gerrard, and asked, not very seriously, if he would be coming to London,” she later wrote. He was, and Marti and Gerrard Friedlander were married in 1957, just two months after they met. She wore a blue dress.
After the wedding, they headed off on Gerrard’s Lambretta scooter with a haversack and tent to travel through Europe, getting as far as Warsaw, Yugoslavia and Greece, before spending time in Israel. Friedlander later remembered how, no matter where they went or how beautiful it was, Gerrard would say that “wait until you get to New Zealand it’s even more beautiful”, especially the South Island. Still, she recalled, “It was obvious to me that there was some ambivalence in his regard for New Zealand as a place to settle, but I couldn’t then define the reason for it.”
They went south, with a plan to stay in New Zealand for a year so she could get to know the place. But Gerrard’s father had gone ahead and leased a dental practice for him, and he couldn’t get out of it. So it was that in 1958, Friedlander found herself settled in the Auckland suburb of Henderson, the wife of a dentist. London had been the Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park. She’d even met Dylan Thomas. Henderson was mutton on Sundays and tea parties. “The transition from city life to a suburban and rural existence was a revelation that I was hardly prepared for, and I didn’t like it one bit.” In an interview with the The New Zealand Herald, she described her alienation: “I was weird. I was very bohemian and I wore yellow stockings and things like that.”
(In Horrocks’ film, the historian James Belich describes the New Zealand of that time as a small-town, rural society “in which what the neighbours would say was in a lot of minds.” He references a law that was on the books until the 1950s which fined farmers who allowed their cattle to mate on paddocks fronting the public road. Propriety and all that.)
See it as a stranger
Spend enough time in the South Island, and at some point you will have to stop your car because of sheep on the road. ‘Eglinton Valley, 1970’ is often referred to as an “iconic” depiction of New Zealand-ness, and the combination of post-colonial farm animals, suspect road infrastructure and Fiordland bush certainly signals there is only one place on earth this could be. But there is also something bigger here. In Horrocks’ documentary, Friedlander says her photography “really began as the response of stranger in a strange land”. Her photos of rural New Zealand encapsulate the quality that former Auckland Art Gallery director Chirs Saines describes like this in his forward to Marti Friedlander: Photographs (2001, by Ron Brownson): “Marti Friedlander’s photography shows us that both people and places can be extraordinary in their ordinariness.”
She and Gerrard travelled often through the South Island on holidays, and she constantly asked him to pull over so she could take photos. “It’s so New Zealand!” she would say. As she told The New Zealand Herald, “I looked around me and I thought, this place is so strange why not photograph it? See it as a stranger. I had a constant state of wonder. I was fascinated by this country, which was so different to where I’d come from. It was rural. It was provincial … [and] I was seen as a stranger too.”
In the photos you can see Friedlander’s fascination with, and fondness for, the place evolving in real time. ‘Eglinton Valley, 1970’ was taken on a trip to Milford with Gerrard. It was early morning, and, indeed, she asked him to stop the car. “I knew I had to get it. It was the light, it was the dust,” she explained in Horrocks’ documentary. Everyone takes pictures of sheep, she noted, but this time it was “as though they have posed for me.”
Bell calls the Eglinton Valley image an example of “really seeing”. The photo “quietly complicates the everyday.”
Meanwhile, the outdoor scene depicted in ‘Campsite, 1969’, which was taken in Arrowtown, depicts the beauty of the alpine foregrounded by human life: caravans, canvas, tea towels on the line. There are no people in the photo, yet there are. Similarly, ‘Scratching fence, 1967’, is another portrait of sheep, this time without the sheep. Tufts of wool on wire suggest both an absence and an encounter, one between the livestock and the thing that hems them in. And ‘Ruapekapeka, 1970’ brings together, incongruously, a lone cow and an artefact of the 1846 Battle of Ruapekapeka, a key confrontation of the New Zealand Wars.
One of Friedlander’s most evocative works (and one of her favourite’s) is ‘Shearers, Balclutha, 1969’. Coincidentally, Douglas Glass, one of the photographers she had worked for in London, was a New Zealander. “He once remarked that he had been a sheep shearer; I had no idea what he meant,” she wrote. When she eventually did start photographing farmers, shearers and auctioneers at work, she said when she asked them for a photo (which she would do brazenly and, apparently, with a directorial approach), they would often express amazement. Why would she bother? But she saw in them what is, to a certain extent, in everyone: extraordinariness. The image of the shearers, for example, interrogates the masculine façade in a way that was probably fairly rare in 1950s South Otago. The pair were, she said, “lovely”, and the work encapsulates “both that wanting to be macho, but not being so at all.” More than just a picture, it’s a dissertation on bloke-dom.
Many of these images appeared in Friedlander’s ground-breaking 1974 book Larks in a Paradise: New Zealand Portraits, which Bell notes was called “a book on New Zealand that creates a genre of its own”.
One day we’ll all only be images
Marti Friedlander died in 2016. By then, she had been awarded the Companion of NZ Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to photography (1999) and shortlisted for the 2001 Montana Book Awards for the book Marti Friedlander: Photographs, with Ron Brownson. In June of 2011, Marti received an Icon Award from the Arts Foundation, which acknowledges lifetime achievement and is limited to a living circle of 20 artists. Even my New Zealand English spellcheck knows her name.
Most of us who live in Aotearoa and have the chance to travel overseas know that moment of revelation when we get back. The needle-sharp light in this place pops when you haven’t seen it for a while, it hews layers you forgot were there. Marti Friedlander’s photos do the same; they show more than what is in them.
According to Bell, Friedlander used to say, “one day we’ll all only be images”. The sheep who stopped to stare at a camera in Eglinton Valley 54 years ago seem to know it too. Hey you, looking at this picture. One day.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
ALL PHOTOS: Marti Friedlander. Courtesy the Gerrard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust, and Starkwhite Auckland and Queenstown.
