Self-Portrait

Marti Friedlander

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781775581475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

From a childhood spent in London's rough East End to a half-century in New Zealand photographing winemakers and artists, children and kuia, Marti Friedlander has lived a life marked by adventure, travel, and its fair share of challenges. It is also a life that has been defined by the art of observation and capturing on film. In Self Portrait, the renowned photographer tells her story for the first time. As clear and unflinching in her prose as she is in her photography, Friedlander describes growing up in a London orphanage, being Jewish, working in a Kensington photography studio, marrying a New Zealander, the challenges of moving to a new country, and a life spent photographing the ordinary and the extraordinary, from balloons and beaches to politicians and protests. She also explains how, with a stranger's eye, she captured the transformation of New Zealand life over the last half century. This is a rich meditation on one woman's photographic journey through the 20th century.

1
Beginnings

At the orphanage, we were always told to begin our letters: ‘I hope you’re as well and happy as we are at present.’ But I was never that well and my sister Anne was never that happy. And we had nobody to write letters to anyway.

I was born Martha Gordon in Bethnal Green, London, on 19 February 1928. My parents were impoverished. They were refugees from the pogroms, living in the East End of London, which was the Jewish Quarter. Bethnal Green was Jewish, then; now it’s Bangladeshi. That’s how it should be. I love the hopefulness of migration, of people trying to better themselves, wanting a better education for their families and children, then moving onwards.

My parents had come, as far as I know, from Kiev in Russia. I know very little about them. The reason I know very little is that my sister and I were placed in an orphanage, the Ben Jonson Home in Mile End, run by the London County Council, when I was three and she was almost five. It was an awful place. It was a practice there to use the ruler every day on every child just to tell them that they should not misbehave. That is my earliest memory. I remember other things from the Mile End home: I remember sitting at a table at breakfast time with the chairs still up on the table, being forced to eat a meal that I hadn’t been able to digest the night before. I was a very sick child, but they obviously hadn’t picked that up and they were forcing me to eat the food. But I try not to hold on to too many of those sorts of memories because you have to move on.

When I was five, by some miracle, my sister Anne and I were taken from the Mile End home and put in the Jewish orphanage in Norwood, the Norwood Orphan Aid Asylum. It saved my life. I would love to know how we got there, or even how they knew there were two Jewish children in the Mile End home – I’ve never been able to find out. But we were rescued from the Mile End home and it saved my life.

It wasn’t until Shirley Horrocks took me back to meet the Norwood after-care committee in 2004, when she was making a documentary about me (Marti: The Passionate Eye), that I learned there was some mystery about my father which nobody seemed to want to share. You wonder. With my mother, I do know things. My parents must have suffered terribly, particularly in losing their two daughters – that was the fate of so many Jewish people. But I don’t want to talk about them further, because I value them too much. I want anything I say about them to be a validation rather than anything else.

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Growing up in the Jewish orphanage was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was born with a deformed duodenum so that I couldn’t digest solid food. As a small child I was in tremendous pain and fainted all the time. The feeling of fainting was the most awful. At the age of eleven I was three feet in height and weighed three stone. I couldn’t even hold a netball. But the Jewish orphanage gave me access to the best medical care available. There was a Jewish hospital in London staffed by Jewish surgeons and doctors, many of them at the height of their profession. My first operation there made it possible for me to eat.

My sister Anne is only fifteen months older than I am, but we have totally different feelings about the orphanage. I think that’s the way it is all through life. You’re born with a character and you’re born with a personality and nothing changes that. It’s just the way that you perceive and react to life.

Anne likes to go back into the past, but I don’t. I’m not ready (even though I’m doing it now, and I ask myself, how have I been persuaded?). I always say to Anne that I’m still living very much in the present. But she reminds me that at the age of six, sitting on a bed in the dormitory – and I do remember it very clearly – she asked me what I’d like to do when I was older, and I said ‘I want to travel the world.’ It seemed unbearable to me, to think that there was a whole world out there and I might never see it. Anne says, even now, that she thinks it unbelievable I should have expressed such urgency. But it wasn’t unbelievable. I think that when you are ill as a child you have a kind of urgency about life that other children just don’t have.

Photographer unknown, Martha and Anne Gordon, late 1940s

Anne always hated being in the orph an age. She says that she would have preferred to have been brought up in a family. I felt differently; the orphanage was where I was, and I received a great deal of affection there. But we probably wouldn’t have survived if we hadn’t had each other – we had an especially close relationship, and we tended to have our most intense friendships with each other. Anne felt a responsibility to be a mother to me, to protect me, but I was too fiercely independent to be mothered. She says I was always the leader. I was terribly tiny but it was true. If there was anything that needed to be dealt with I would always go straight up to the headmistress and say, this needs to be resolved. It may be, also, that my receiving so much attention was difficult for a sister, but she says no, it was never difficult for her. She was a sportswoman, and she wrote poems that were reproduced in our magazine – I thought they were fantastic. She still writes, mainly screenplays these days. And we are still very close, but now we live far apart.

We were lucky, in a way: not knowing much about our background, we could fantasise about our antecedents, and we did. I can’t say that it’s a good thing to grow up in an orphanage. But sometimes, when people say with pity, ‘Oh, you grew up in an orphanage’, I look at them and say, ‘But you grew up in a nuclear family, there must have been incredible tension.’ And of course they often admit that it wasn’t always so wonderful after all.

Love is the most energising thing. Even in the orphanage I was fortunate to receive a great deal, which gave me the ability to recover. It’s what you wish for every child. A lot of the children in the orphanage probably didn’t feel that they had so much love; some were traumatised. Many of them had a parent still living, who came to visit once a month on visitors’ day. Anne and I never had visitors. There was no one to visit us. But children just don’t give up. We would stand there by the gate, thinking that we might have visitors – this is becoming painful for me to remember. The other children would be given parcels of kosher food, wonderful delicacies. But they were always generous and would share it with others.

The orphanage taught a very strong ethical code. I can remember picking up a farthing in the street and handing it to the headmistress. We were given a halfpenny every week for spending money, so an extra farthing in those days was like a fortune, but I would never have thought of keeping it. It was just part of the ethos of the teaching there.

I loved school. I was desperate to learn. In my early years in the orphanage, aside from Anne it was the teachers who had a strong effect on me. One in particular thought I was very bright – I had written something clever and he gave me a penny as a reward. I was so flattered. I wanted all my life to meet him again because I felt he had had such an influence on me. Years afterwards, I saw this teacher in a Jewish vegetarian restaurant in Hampstead; he would have been in his eighties then. I went up to him, expecting that he would remember me. Of course he hadn’t a clue who I was. I thought I would have been unforgettable. Another salutary lesson in life.

I could read fluently when I was only five, not that I understood what I was reading. The teachers must have realised that. I am a visual person, so I could look at the words and pronounce them. I remember being taken by the headmaster of the orphanage into every classroom to show me off. As a child you’re not aware that you’re doing something special. You’re play-acting. You’ve been asked to play a role, and children are usually obedient if they’re asked to perform. Because I was a very tiny child, he carried me in his arms. I remember in one classroom the teacher took down a box of biscuits and offered me one, in front of all the children, as a reward for my reading.

At the age of eleven, I missed the Eleven Plus exam because I was in hospital. But at fourteen, I was given the opportunity to try for a Trade Scholarship to Bloomsbury Technical School for Women – which I did, and won. Someone then interviewed me and said, look, what would you like to study? I said dress designing, because I had been very good at sewing. They said, why don’t you take up photography. I said, what’s that?

I knew that there were photographers who would come to the school to photograph us sometimes, but I didn’t have an idea of photography as something that you could study, let alone make a career of. The one thing I knew was that I would have to support myself somehow, and that I needed to learn a practical skill that would lead to a good job.

2
Childhood

A is for Anna, c. 1966

I’ve photographed children a lot. Because I don’t have many images of myself as a child, when I started photographing children it really mattered to me. I couldn’t stand those photographs of children lying on their tummies in a studio. They were sentimental. Childhood is full of complexity. It’s strange that the traditional portrayal of children in family photographs is all happiness and sentiment, because childhood is full of bumps and bruises and sadness and joy and innocence.

Children themselves, of course, don’t have a sentimental attitude toward life – it’s only the attitude to childhood that’s sentimental. If children have a hard life, they manage to cope; if they have a good life, they take it for granted because they have nothing to compare it to. So that was why I was interested in photographing children.

I might also have been interested in photographing children because I lost my own daughter and regretted not being a mother. I had a lot of maternal feeling towards children, and I still do. But I never related the work to how it might have been for me; my own experience was unique and I had to put it aside somehow.

I did want to convey the visual truth of childhood. The child, the small young human being, has to be tough to survive birth for a start. We all have in common that first scream. I wanted to portray children sad, laughing, weeping, screaming, with cuts and bruises and smudges and dirt. I wanted to give the parents photographs in which their child was revealed. I would say to them, please go away, this is between me and the child. Often the child would say, I don’t want to be photographed – and I’d say, I quite understand, you don’t have to. Immediately they wanted to be photographed.

I began by photographing my nieces Nina, Sonya and Anna, whom I loved. I would stay with them in the Coromandel over the Christmas period, and they are the subject of some of my most iconic images of New Zealand childhood.

Coromandel, 1966

Fanshawe Street, 1966

I also took many photographs of Moran Palmoni, the young son of an Israeli couple whom we became very close friends with when they lived in New Zealand from 1965 to 1967. Yair and Irit had come to New Zealand to work with Jewish children and teach them about Israel. I met Moran when he was four, and we just clicked. It’s something you can’t explain. Even though we live on opposite sides of the world, we are still very close; he came to New Zealand when my retrospective exhibition was launched at the Auckland Art Gallery.

This photograph shows Yair and Irit relaxing in the park with Moran. Irit is pregnant with Yasmin. Look how relaxed she is and what a lovely moment it is in the life of a family. It’s quite an unusual portrait, because in those days a pregnant belly was not something that was exposed so naturally. I love the fact that after Yasmin was born, Family Planning made a poster of this beautiful baby being hugged by her father, which was an unusual image for those days.

Palmoni family, c. 1966

Moran Palmoni, c. 1966

I also made a photo essay about Moran’s first day at school at Remuera Primary. Yair and Irit lived in flats on Remuera Road. Moran was so excited about going to school, even though he was tentative as well. You can see the pride that his parents feel, tinged with sadness that he’s no longer a baby. The first day of school is a real milestone. I also photographed the children of other friends on their first days of school, because I’m so aware of these rites of passage, perhaps because my own were never celebrated or commemorated.

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I knew Maté and Melba Brajkovich quite well in the 1960s – he started the winery that became Kumeu River Wines – and they asked me to photograph their children. I was an observer while the children were interacting with their parents. Maté has since died – he died very young – but look at the rapport between him and his son, the direct eye-line. Meanwhile, Marijana is looking directly at me and yet is deeply in contact with her father. I was so touched when I saw that photograph on the back of a Film Festival programme a few years ago that I rang up Melba immediately and I said, ‘Melba, your family has shown me something that I haven’t seen for years.’ I think it’s Maté’s connection with both the children. Often portraits of ch...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Childhood
• 3 Being Jewish
• 4 Independence
• 5 Self-Portraits
• 6 Gerrard
• 7 Other Couples
• 8 New Zealand
• 9 Parihaka
• 10 Moko
• 11 Politics and Personalities
• 12 Writers and Artists
• 13 Protest
• 14 Getting Older
• 15 Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Afterword
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright Page
• Backcover