Iconic New Zealand photographer Marti Friedlander has died, aged 88.

A public post to her Facebook page shortly before midday on Monday said: "We are very sad to inform you that Marti passed away peacefully this morning."

Social media has since been flooded with tributes to her, including salutes from political figures, photographers, artists, writers and her many friends.

CHRIS SKELTON/FAIRFAX NZ Photographer Marti Friedlander, at her home last month.

The tributes on her Facebook page included messages from poet Paula Green, publisher Paul Little, politicians Sue Kedgley and David Shearer and author Pip Adam. Art conservator Sarah Hillary wrote of "an amazing woman and incredible life". Author Catherine Chidgey said: "What a taonga she was and is." Labour MP Grant Robertson tweeted that Friedlander had "captured New Zealand+New Zealanders like no other".

Friedlander, who was born in London and raised with her sister in a Jewish orphanage, moved to New Zealand with her Kiwi husband Gerrard in 1958. Already a photographer, she picked up her camera and began taking pictures of her new country – which she at first found distressingly conservative – with an outsider's eye.

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* "At this time of your life, everything is courage."

Last month Friedlander told Fairfax that the breast cancer she had previously fought had returned, and that she had been increasingly unwell for the past year. On October 17 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Literature by Auckland University in recognition of her life of photography, in a ceremony that she described as "wonderful" and "so moving".

In her final weeks a stream of visitors came to her and her husband's home in Parnell, Auckland. Although unable to move far or fast, Friedlander welcomed them with huge smiles and hugs and effusive gratitude.

She told Fairfax: "I've not felt sorry for myself, not once [...] I've always felt that life is something none of us understand. It's been an amazing journey."

SUPPLIED Marti Friedlander with the honorary doctorate she was awarded last month.

On Monday Adina Halpern, who was often at Friedlander's side in her final weeks, said Marti had been "still enjoying her life and engaging with the world" to the very end, and had spent a lot of time looking through photos, including her own. Halpern, who described herself as Friedlander's "sort-of adopted daughter", said she was someone with "a remarkable capacity for love and life. All of her friends knew how incredibly special they were to her, and she was a person who was truly loved."

Friedlander's camera recorded everyday New Zealand life, but she also documented the rapid social change of the 1960s and beyond, taking many iconic images of rallies and protests in support of women's rights, Maori rights and peace campaigns.

She was especially drawn to the arts, befriending and photographing a wide range of New Zealand artists and writers, and her images of elderly mokoed Maori women, taken in the 1970s for a book by historian Michael King, were instantly recognised as classics.

Friedlander's work was widely published and reproduced and she had numerous gallery exhibitions. She was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1998. She was the subject of a documentary, Marti: the Passionate Eye, in 2004, and a biography by art historian Leonard Bell in 2009. In 2013 she published a photographic memoir, Self-Portrait.

Friedlander was working till the end, and very recently completed a series of 28 portraits of Waiheke Island winemakers, for a book she said was due out in February.

Her funeral will be held at 2.30pm on Wednesday November 16, at Waikumete Cemetery's Beit Olam prayer house.