Adrienne Martyn's latest exhibition, Seen/Scene, at He Waka Tuia, Invercargill, is a series of 41 photographic portraits of people from the LGBTQIA+ community who have lived in Southland. Martyn, who now lives in Wellington, grew up in Invercargill; a self-portrait is included in the exhibition. Her return to the portrait genre also presents an opportunity to reflect on her well-known portraits of New Zealand artists in the 1980s, which were quickly acquired by many of this country's public art galleries. In between times, she has produced an extensive body of work focusing on architecture, particularly studies of the interiors of venerable buildings fallen into disuse or stripped of their previous contents or functions. There have been forays too into landscape, and a residency at the Dunedin School of Art in 2022 yielded Snow Line, a composite and abstracted representation of Central Otago's Rock and Pillar Range. The following interview took place at the Dunedin School of Art, where Martyn herself briefly studied in 1977. It charts the emergence and consolidation of an approach to photography and portraiture that is recognisably formal, both in terms of the restrained presentation of the sitter and the aesthetic values of the image.
Adrienne Martyn: I started my first studio in 1980 on Moray Place, Dunedin, in one of the old terrace house buildings opposite the Fortune Theatre, and I lived in the upstairs flat. There was a display case on the building with my name, the word ‘photographer’ and two images. They were studio portraits, black-and-white, a bit different from what professional photographers in Dunedin were doing.
I was attempting to make a living as a portrait photographer. I never did. For that, it didn't work. I packed up the studio in 1981, but before I left took a few quick shots of it—here they are. The studio was painted black and white, of course. I did practically all my photography on a Rollei SL66, with studio lighting. The darkroom was round the back. The chairs were from a junk shop; I used one of them for Marie and Diane (1980). And there were card tables I could collapse or put up for product photography, which is where I made money to support the studio.
That meant I could indulge my ideas and seriously engage with
