NZ Women Photographers to Buy at Auction
From Marti Friedlander to Fiona Pardington, these are the artists shaping photography at auction.
Te Papa recently opened Slow Burn: Women and Photography | Ahi Tāmau: Māreikura Whakaahua, a major exhibition bringing together women and non-binary artists working with photography from the 1960s onwards. If you’re in Wellington, it looks well worth a visit.
Rather than review the exhibition itself, I wanted to profile the women and non-binary artists working with photography whose works regularly appear at auction. Some names, such as Ans Westra and Fiona Pardington, will likely already be familiar. Others are less well known outside art circles. What links them is that each has a recognisable presence on the secondary market, offering a useful snapshot of how photography is valued in New Zealand.
While a number of the works by these artists have achieved six-figure results, many more come to auction at far more affordable prices. That is reflected in the prices below, with most median prices sitting under $10,000 and many closer to $1,000.
Marti Friedlander (1928 - 2016)
Auction Record: $24,255 | Median Price: $6,006
Marti Friedlander is one of New Zealand’s most important photographers, celebrated for images that captured both the country’s cultural figures and everyday life with rare sensitivity. She is especially associated with her portraits of artists and writers, but her work ranged much more widely than that, with her most expensive photograph at auction capturing a sheep drive in Eglinton Valley.
Ans Westra (1936 - 2023)
Auction Record: $23,152 | Median Price: $3,585
Ans Westra was one of New Zealand’s best-known social documentary photographers, and Washday at the Pa remains one of the defining and most debated photographic projects made in this country. Her strongest photographs are black-and-white images of everyday life with an immediacy that has made them part of the visual history of New Zealand.
Adrienne Martyn (b. 1950)
Auction Record: $1,802 | Median Price: $913
Adrienne Martyn is best known for black-and-white portraits, particularly of New Zealand artists, along with pared-back studies of architecture and urban surfaces. She gained recognition for her intimate portraits of prominent New Zealand artists and her precise, high-contrast documentations of empty interiors, abandoned buildings, and textured surfaces.
Anne Noble (b. 1954)
Auction Record: $18,760 | Median Price: $2,426
Anne Noble’s practice moves across a wide range of subjects, from convent interiors to Antarctica to her photographs of her daughter Ruby, Noble often brings a mix of closeness, curiosity and strangeness to her photographs.
Christine Webster (b. 1958)
Auction Record: $6,843 | Median Price: $483
Christine Webster is known for staged colour photographs that feel theatrical, psychologically charged and slightly destabilising. Rather than using photography simply to record the world, she has long used it to build symbolic, emotionally loaded scenes that sit somewhere between performance, dream and unease.
Marie Shannon (b. 1960)
Auction Record: $4,780 | Median Price: $1,770
Marie Shannon has spent decades making intimate, thoughtful work out of domestic interiors, everyday objects and the creative lives around her. Frequently utilising large-format, black-and-white photography, much of her recent output involves cataloging the studio archive of her late partner, the artist Julian Dashper.
Fiona Pardington (b. 1961)
Auction Record: $133,338 | Median Price: $20,617
Fiona Pardington is one of New Zealand’s most prolific and commercially successful contemporary photographers, internationally recognised for her innovative and meticulously composed images. Her large scale still lifes primarily document native birds of New Zealand (particularly the extinct huia), as well Maori taonga and life casts. She has been selected to represent New Zealand at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Lisa Reihana (b.1964)
Auction Record: $94,433 | Median Price: $17,082
Lisa Reihana is one of New Zealand’s most internationally recognised contemporary artists, working across photography, video, and sculpture to examine colonialism and questions of identity through a contemporary Māori and Pacific perspective. She is best known for her 26 metre-wide panoramic video in Pursuit of Venus [infected] that brings to life Joseph Dufour’s Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique.
Ava Seymour (b. 1967)
Auction Record: $9,731 | Median Price: $879
Ava Seymour is best known for photographs and photo-collages that poke at the myths of suburban New Zealand. Her best-known series, Health, Happiness and Housing, overlays surreal figures in front of drab state housing employing dark humour to critique the social structures and domestic life of the inhabitants. She was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in 2001.
Ann Shelton (b. 1967)
Auction Record: $13,814 | Median Price: $7,845
Ann Shelton is a research-driven conceptual photographer whose works often draw on archives and overlooked histories. Her notable projects include jane says, a series documenting plants historically used by women to control fertility, and her earlier documentary work capturing Auckland's 1990s art scene.
Yvonne Todd (b. 1973)
Auction Record: $21,021 | Median Price: $2,408
Yvonne Todd first gained major attention after winning the inaugural Walters Prize in 2022. She has built one of the most distinctive photographic practices in New Zealand, creating highly staged portraits and still lifes that are glossy, awkward, and slightly unsettling.
Yuki Kihara (b. 1975)
Auction Record: $6,246 | Median Price: $1,880
Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans photography, performance, film, and sculpture to challenge dominant colonial narratives, gender narratives, and environmental crises. Accolades include a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, more recently, representation of New Zealand at the 2022 Venice Biennale with Paradise Camp, a celebrated project that "upcycled" Paul Gauguin's paintings using Fa'afafine models to reclaim Pacific visual history.
Roberta Thornley (b. 1985)
Auction Record: $6,606 | Median Price: $1,625
Roberta Thornley’s practice encompasses portraiture, landscape, and still life. She is recognised for her precise control of lighting and tonal contrast to explore themes of time, narrative, and physical states. Her notable projects include documentary portraits in Rwanda, the "A Serious Girl" series focused on physical recovery during her residency at Tylee Cottage in Whanganui, and recent medical photography at Waikato Hospital. She was the winner of the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award in 2017.
Note: Highest price is based on all publicly available auction results. Median price is based on works sold over the past five years.