Pat and Gil Hanly

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

With paint-stained trousers and cigarette in hand, artist Pat Hanly adopts the manner of a Kiwi joker or workman. He stands slightly in front of his photographer wife, Gil, whose hand touches the doorframe. The viewer's attention is concentrated on the hands and bare feet of both subjects. We sense an intimacy between this couple and their surroundings.

Out of the dark interior of the suburban home, they step forth into daylight, like the figures in Hanly’s great ‘Figures in light’ series of the mid-1960s. Marti Friedlander’s portrait offers a glimpse of the inner life of a marriage and a hint of the enveloping family life of their home. Without interrupting the calm of the moment, Friedlander’s photograph captures a sense of the idealism and the physicality of the couple, their closeness and, paradoxically perhaps, a slight distance.

As a double-portrait or portrait of a marriage, the image playfully echoes paintings from the Western canon such as Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait, 1434 (National Gallery, London), and Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago). The photograph is one of a large number of artist portraits taken by Friedlander from the 1960s onwards, many of which became well known through Jim and Mary Barr’s New Zealand artists A–M, 1980. Friedlander paid particular attention to the relationships between artists and their partners — as if she were exploring not only the meaning of her own marriage but also revisiting the tragic loss at age three of both of her parents. Friedlander’s artist portraits were influenced by Alexander Liberman’s The artist in his studio, 1960, yet hers go further, as curator Ron Brownson has pointed out, to ‘expose the human meaning of experiencing life as a creative artist’.1 For all its informality, there is a gravitas to her image of the Hanlys.

An emigrant from England in 1958, Friedlander used her camera to come to terms with her new home, and also to steer her way through a decade of great social change. These were the heady years of the sexual revolution and the protest movement, and Pat and Gil Hanly were in the thick of it. Friedlander’s double-portrait captures a moment of stillness in which the spirit of the times lingers just below the surface.

Gregory O'Brien

1 Ron Brownson (ed.), Marti Friedlander photographs, Auckland Art Gallery and Godwit, Auckland, 2001, p. 13.