Works by photographer Marti Friedlander on show at Stratford's Percy Thomson Gallery

Marti Friedlander, Philip Clairmont 1978. Image Copywright: Gerard and Marti Friedlander Charitable Trust

The Percy Thomson Gallery is currently showing an outstanding exhibition of 80 portraits by one of this country's most influential photographers.

The exhibition, Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists, presents 80 portraits, many of them unseen publicly for many years if at all.

Friedlander's work has been praised nationally and internationally. Her oeuvre of portraits of creative people is unequalled in New Zealand.

Friedlander (1928–2016) made compelling and insightful portraits of artists, writers, potters, actors, film makers and musicians from 1959 to 2015.

This was a conscious project on her part, initially motivated by her belief that creative people in the arts did not receive the public recognition they deserved from mainstream New Zealand society. Friedlander's portraits are both insightful and compelling portrayals of independent-minded individuals, which make up a telling chronicle of the shifts in the country's cultural life from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. They now constitute an invaluable social and artistic history.

Friedlander was deeply engaged in the cultural world she pictured while at the same time maintaining a certain distance. As an immigrant, she was an outsider who came inside and perhaps, thus saw what New Zealand-born insiders may not, or could not, have seen. Her portraits include friends and others she had just met, including the now well-known and celebrated – Ralph Hotere, Rita Angus, James K Baxter and CK Stead – as well as the now forgotten or overlooked who, nevertheless, were prominent practitioners at the time such as Suzanne Goldberg, Paul Olds Jeff Macklin and Pauline Thompson.

Friedlander had a long career as a photographer. Born in London, she spent her childhood in a Jewish orphanage. She won a trade scholarship at age 14 and studied photography, subsequently securing a job as a photographic assistant in a portrait and fashion studio in Kensington. She married New Zealander Gerrard Friedlander in 1957 and came to live in New Zealand in 1958.

Homesick and lonely, she committed herself to photographing a country she believed to be on the brink of great change. In the 1999 New Year Honours, Friedlander was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to photography, and in 2004 she was the subject of a documentary by Shirley Horrocks entitled Marti: the Passionate Eye.

In 2007 the Arts Foundation of New Zealand launched the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award, presented every two years to an experienced photographer. In 2011 she received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Award. She was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by the University of Auckland in 2016. In October 2016, Friedlander revealed that she was suffering from late-stage breast cancer. She died at her home in Auckland on November 14, 2016 aged 88.

This exhibition is curated by Len Bell, toured by the NZ Portrait Gallery and runs until Sunday September 5.