Tony Fomison

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

Marti Friedlander began photographing artists in the mid-1960s because, she wrote, ‘I felt that artists should be revealed to a world that seemed indifferent to them.’1 Her portrait of the painter Tony Fomison was commissioned in the late 1970s for the book Contemporary New Zealand Painters. It operates within a tradition that has seen photographers focus on artists, writers and others working in the creative sphere, as if looking for clues that connect the person’s appearance to their work. Friedlander has always been intent on creating a rapport with her subjects in order that they disclose something of themselves to the camera. She said of the experience of photographing Fomison that ‘it was a time when artists needed to create a mystique about what it is to be a creative person. I never went along with that sort of disguise, although I could understand the need for it. When I went to photograph Tony... I told him to stop acting... I’ve come here and I’m taking you seriously; I want you to take me seriously too, artist to artist.’

1 Marti Friedlander, Self-portrait, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2013, p.183.