Artwork Information

Frank Hofmann was an influential photographer, both commercially and artistically, who introduced interwar European modernist ideas and practices to New Zealand. Born in Prague in 1916, Hofmann (who was Jewish) escaped to England after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Christchurch in 1940 where he established himself as a freelance photographer.

Hofmann's work explores the camera's capacity to express heightened emotions and a contemporary essence, drawing on techniques that were pivotal to modern photography movements of the 1920s and 1930s. His images frequently employ ambiguity, a lyrical interplay of line, shape, light and shadow, strange angles, and above all a transformation of the ordinary.

The subject of the portrait is the artist’s wife, New Zealand writer Helen Shaw (1913-1985). Shaw was a graduate of Canterbury College and a member of Christchurch’s thriving art scene during the 1930s. She and Frank Hofmann married in 1941. Shaw published her own fiction and poetry and is credited with editing the first volume of essays on the work of New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson in 1955.