Remembering her emigration to New Zealand [in 1958, photographer] Marti Friedlander [1928-2016] wrote: 'I had no idea when I arrived I would find it so difficult. This outpost of England was thoroughly unfamiliar to me. The transition from city life to a suburban and rural existence was a revelation I was hardly prepared for... Nevertheless, being optimistic by nature, I set about adapting to the new life ahead of me. I never attempted to make pavlova, but I did preserve fruits and veges, bake bread, climb mountains, wade through rivers, get lost in the bush, and generally embrace a pioneering spirit of sorts. No matter how assimilated one appears on the surface, most migrants have a nostalgia for their own culture. Such ambivalence can seem threatening to the host country [but] I believe that a country's maturity is reflected in the way it regards its minorities, and welcomes the diversity in its midst.
Consequently, taking and making pictures was a crucial means of connecting with people and places in this new land. 'I probably would never have become a professional photographer if I had not shifted here,' Marti noted in her journal in the late 1970s. Photography enabled her to remake herself. Displacement and the loss of what she was most familiar with triggered her creativity. Not surprisingly, migration and the ways immigrants and travellers face new societies which are strange to them are primary themes in her work.
- Leonard Bell, Marti Friedlander, Auckland, 2009, p.151
