Artist Portraits 1981-89
Adrienne Martyn, Di ffrench, 1985, pigment print, 675 x 675
With so much of Adrienne Martyn’s photography leading back to her time in Dunedin, it is fitting that she is exhibiting a selection of her well-known artist portraits in the city this month. She talks to Rebecca Fox.
Adrienne Martyn was sitting in a Dunedin School of Art class listening to art lecturer Raymond Ward dissect Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s Milk Maid painting when it just clicked.
Until then Martyn had been in a quandary about what to do with her photography.
It was the 1970s. She was working at the Otago Daily Times in the darkroom processing photographs when she decided to go to art school in search of direction.
That class on Vermeer "clinched it" for Martyn. "It just made sense to me, his focus on textures. It is still resonating in my work today."
While Martyn, who grew up in Invercargill, started playing with a camera when she was in high school, it was not until she moved to Dunedin in the 1960s, getting work at Ken and David Lloyd’s photographic studio darkroom, that she learned the techniques behind processing film photographs.
She then headed off to Sydney working as a darkroom technician for The Sydney Morning Herald and freelancing as a photographer.
Read the full article by Rebecca Fox, Otago Daily Times Article, 6 August 2020:
https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/arts/photographer-bringing-art-home
Note: the ODT has taken on themselves to crop all the photographs in the article. View them un-cropped on the Olga Gallery website here