AWRF10 - An hour with Marti Friedlander

I'm really sorry I couldn't make it to this event as I am a huge fan of Marti Friedlander -- her talent and her personality both. Luckily my colleague Juliana went and contributed this report for Books in the City.

Leonard Bell, art historian and author of the book “Marti Friedlander”, began this session by talking about photography as the art of “drawing with light”. And then he introduced the woman who was to keep a packed audience entranced for the next hour. 

For fifty years Marti Friedlander has been documenting New Zealand and New Zealanders. Early on she made a conscious decision to try and capture the faces of emerging artists. As portrait after glorious portrait of artists and writers appeared on the screen, Marti talked about the photographs and the subjects. She explained how she uses only available light, her own “bossiness”, the vulnerability and strength of her subjects when the photograph was taken and what was happening in her own life at that time. There was a lovely moment of interaction with the photographer Gil Hanly, who was in the front row taking photographs and on the screen circa 1968 with husband Pat Hanly.

Marti talked about her love of faces and how hard she was finding not being able to see us, her audience. It was,she said, like “talking to shadows”.

The hour flew by we followed the “Clap, clap, clap” message on the screen with enthusiasm and warmth. We could have listened and looked for a lot, lot longer.

AWRF10: William Taylor - Telling Tales

Juliana Austen is Childen's Advisor at Auckland City Libraries and a passionate reader. Attending Friday morning's AWRF 2010 event with William Taylor, chaired by Tessa Duder, gave her a new title for her reading list, as she tells us in this guest post:

This session was a joy – I felt I was eavesdropping on the lively conversation of two good friends who just happened to be William Taylor and Tessa Duder, renowned authors of books for children and young people.

William Taylor started writing novels for adults, “a useful apprenticeship for the much harder task” of writing for children and teens. He became a full time writer and his funny, often controversial books have been published and acclaimed all over the world. One, he assured us, was still in print in Albania!

His latest book is a memoir Telling tales, a life in writing. Tessa Duder encouraged the writing of this memoir based, he said, on the frequent telling of the story of the unveiling of the Ohakune carrot. You see, William Taylor was the mayor of Ohakune, he was also the Principal of the Ohakune School, a single parent, part owner of a restaurant and by some quirk of local body politics registered as the sole living resident of the Ohakune cemetery!

I can’t wait to read it.