Marti: The Passionate Eye

Television (Full Length) – 2004

Arriving downunder from London in 1958, Marti Friedlander began photographing New Zealand, partly as a way of coming to terms with what she saw as its foreignness. In the process she captured aspects of Aotearoa that familiarity had made invisible to its inhabitants. She photographed artists, Springbok Tour protesters, and kuia with moko (for a book with historian Michael King). After screening on TV One, Shirley Horrocks' documentary was one of 20 chosen to screen at Doku.Arts 2007, a German festival devoted to films about artists. Friedlander passed away in November 2016.

Marti's photographs were fundamentally about New Zealand in a way that I dare say a New Zealander could not have captured because 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