Self-Portrait

Description

From a childhood in London orphanages to half a century in New Zealand photographing wine-makers and artists, children and kuia, Marti Friedlander has lived a rich life - one defined by the art of looking, seeing, capturing on film. In Self-Portrait, Marti tells her story for the first time. As unflinching and clear in prose as in her photographs, she describes growing up in a London orphanage, being Jewish, working in a Kensington photography studio, marrying a New Zealander and moving to a challenging new country. Here she spent her life photographing the ordinary and the extraordinary, protests and politicians, balloons and beaches. Seeing with a stranger's eye, Marti Friedlander describes how she captured the transformation of New Zealand's life over more than fifty years. This book is a rich meditation on one woman's photographic journey through the twentieth century.

Marti Friedlander is New Zealand's leading photographer whose work features in books including Moko: The Art of Maori Tattooing (with Michael King, 1972), Larks in Paradise: New Zealand Portraits (with James McNeish, 1974) and Contemporary New Zealand Painters: Volume 1, A-M (with Jim and Mary Barr, 1980). Her work is also the subject of a number of books including Marti Friedlander by Leonard Bell (2009), shortlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. She became a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1998. Hugo Manson is a senior New Zealand oral historian. He was co-founder, with Judith Fyfe, of the New Zealand Oral History Archive (now the Oral History Centre at the Alexander Turnbull Library) and has specialised for many years in recording contemporary oral history in many parts of the world.