The Marti Friedlander Photographic Award

On 28 November 2007 at the Auckland City Gallery in Auckland, Marti Friedlander announced that she and her husband Gerrard Friedlander are to leave a substantial sum to the Arts Foundation to establish a new award for photographers.

An exciting contribution to the world of photography, the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award, Supported by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand, will be presented every two years to an established photographer with a record of excellence and the potential to carry on producing work at high levels. The Award includes a donation of $25,000 for the photographer to use as they please with the goal of further their careers.

The inaugural recipient is Edith Amituanai, a widely exhibited artist and a finalist in a number of awards.

Edith Amituanai - Inaugural Marti Friedlander Photographic Award Recipient

Edith was born in 1980 and brought up in Te Atatu. She graduated from Unitec in 2005 with a Bachelor of Design, majoring in photography. Edith’s parents came to New Zealand from Samoa in the 1960s and 70s, and settled Christchurch, where a number of their relations still live. Extended family and immediate community are primary subjects for Edith, who collaborates closely with Christchurch and Auckland relations as well as the individuals she grew up with in West Auckland.  In particular, she focuses on a group of families who once lived in the inner city of Auckland and attended the Pacific Island Church in Edinburgh Street, Newton.  

Edith’s work draws on documentary and constructed photographic traditions. Intimacy with the world she photographs is important. She is most drawn to portraiture, which typically falls outside of documentary photography. She also photographs interiors with no people present and then uses this interior as the setting for a portrait. Her photographs for the exhibition Mrs Amituanai worked across this portrait/interior divide by presenting both the rooms and people in the rooms.

Edith has been finalist for a number of Awards including the Trust Waikato National Contemporary Art Award, The Martin Hughes Contemporary Pacific Art Award, Auckland and the KLM Paul Huf Award, Amsterdam.  Her work was included in the 2004/05 Break/Shift exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, curated by Simon Rees and Greg Burke. In 2005 her first solo exhibition, Mrs Amituanai, was held at the Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland. Later that year her work was included in the publication, Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, edited by Lara Strongman and Hannah Holm. In 2006 the exhibition Mrs Amituanai was exhibited at the Wellington City Gallery as part of the 2 x 2 Contemporary Projects, curated by Emma Bugden. In 2007 she has exhibited at the Auckland Museum, St Paul Street Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery and NBK Berlin. Her work has been acquired for the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery, Sarjeant Art Gallery in Wanganui, University of Auckland, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Auckland District Health Board.

“Francine and Shiloh are the result of a trip to Samoa this year (2008), my first in 20 years. Francine, the image of an outdoor living room, takes its name from one of the homeowner's daughters who used the name as her internet pseudonym.

Although I felt an immediate connection to my ancestral homeland, as a visitor I had no room of my own and found myself making portraits of my daughter, Shiloh, outdoors. This related to my experience in France last year when I photographed my ex-pat New Zealand Samoan cousins and friends who have left home to pursue professional rugby contracts.
I ventured onto the rugby field rather than into the homes of my subjects to make portraits. What comes up in these images for me is the way issues unfold in time, like the time it takes to build a home, and the way time spent in a place determines your relationship to it. I'm interested in the ways your home is an adaptation to the environment you live in, what gets left behind and what is carried on from the place you’ve come from.” Edith Amituanai, May 2008.

Marti Friedlander

Marti Friedlander, CNZM, is widely recognised as one of New Zealand's senior artists, with a long career as a photographer. Her subjects have been diverse: portraiture, rural, urban and suburban scenes as well as 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, including  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 with Dick Scott, 2002.

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 attention both at the International Film Festivals in New Zealand in 2004 and on local television. She was awarded the Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit in 1999 for services to photography.

"Marti Friedlander has documented street demonstrations from everyone from the first anti-Springbok tour protestors to the Pentecostals, from the hippies to the women’s movement. She has watched our lifestyle evolve from the six o’clock swill, through the early days of the wine industry and the first tentative Connoisseurs Club outings, right up to today’s café society."
Shirley Horrocks, Documentary Director and Producer