Ans Westra, a Dutch-born photographer who created the most comprehensive profile of New Zealand’s social history, including more than 300,000 powerful photographs, died on February 26 at his home. in the suburbs of Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. She was 86.
David Alsop of Suite Gallery in Wellington, her friend and gallery owner, said the cause was a heart complication.
From her arrival in New Zealand more than six decades ago until the end of her life, Mrs. Westra has chronicled the lives of her countrymen with unwavering determination in frames praised for their realism and naturalness. The subjects in her Rolleiflex camera are often outside of the conservative white New Zealand community, including the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand.
Her wide-ranging focus sometimes gets her into controversy.
“Washday at the Pa,” her 1964 book about a rural Maori family of nine children living in poverty, will be distributed in New Zealand schools. But it became a “political soccer game,” as she later described it, and all 38,000 copies were withdrawn, and many were crushed, after the Women’s Welfare League Māori said that the images made the Maori seen as unfair and unkind.
However, Ray Ahipene-Mercer, whose mother has campaigned against the book, said Mrs Westra’s images possessed a rare sheen, and the controversy was an early example of “what is presently”. popular among Māori – ‘nothing about us without us. ‘”
“She saw us,” he said at a memorial service for Miss Westra in Wellington, “and reflected on us.”
Anna Jacoba Westra was born on April 28, 1936 in the western Dutch city of Leiden. The only child of Pieter Westra, a jewelry merchant, and Hendrika van Doorn, a storekeeper, she recalls a lonely childhood in which she learned to entertain herself.
Her first exposure to photography was thanks to her stepfather, who had a Leica camera. A more formative experience came in 1956, when she viewed the traveling exhibition “The man’s family,” through more than 500 photographs that sought to portray the universal human condition.
The performance will have a lasting impact on her stylistic choices and themes, sometimes described by fans as intimate or human and by detractors as sentimental.
In 1957, Ms. Westra graduated from the voor Meisjes Industrial School, a technical college for girls in Rotterdam, with a diploma in teaching arts and crafts. That same year, she went to New Zealand to visit her father, who had moved to Auckland, the country’s largest city, after her parents’ marriage broke down.
Ms Westra hopes to create a record of Indigenous New Zealand life that reflects an ever-changing people, amid intense urbanization and forced assimilation. Unlike the rudimentary Maori images created for the tourist market, “my photos are more natural,” she said in an interview with Art New Zealand magazine in 2013, adding: “I want to observe life as it is without interrupting it as much as possible.”
After working at a pottery studio in West Auckland, Ms Westra moved to Wellington, where she worked in a camera shop until she saved enough money to buy a second hand Volkswagen, making it easy for her to photograph life. in rural New Zealand.
By 1962, Mrs. Westra was a full-time freelance photographer, traveling around the country, as well as to Tonga and the Philippines, and selling her photographs to a magazine run by the Ministry of Maori Affairs. operations and for school publications. The fees she is paid usually only cover her expenses.
Over the decades that followed, Ms Westra persistently documented life in New Zealand, turning her lens on gang members, tourists, rugby players, land rights activists. Maori, New Zealand Muslim, prostitutes and many other groups. Snapping from the sidelines, she was an uncommon presence, 5 feet 10 inches tall and speaking with a deep Dutch accent, an accent she retained for the rest of her life.
A single mother of three, Ms. Westra has never been married and has never found an alternative job; she forged a frugal life throughout the 1960s and 70s as a freelancer. She struggled with her mental health at times, and she was briefly admitted to a psychiatric ward in the early 1990s.
Photography remains central to her life: Her children often recall being piled into the backseat of her car to join her in the marae (Maori meeting house) to take pictures and live in the houses. The house always has a room for film coating. She celebrates what she considers a valuable outsider’s view – something that distances her, even if it later leads to criticism.
“I can understand where they are coming from, they question that. Why should I be the one to record them?” she talks about her photos of the Maori in the Art New Zealand interview. “I find that being an outsider gives you a clearer vision, but I can understand questioning whether my approach is correct.”
After “Washday in the Pa”, Ms. Westra created the images for many books. While “Māori” (1967) and “Whaiora: The Pursuit of Life” (1985), written with Kāterina Mataira, a Maori writer, again focused on indigenous New Zealanders, “Notes on the Country” I Live In,” published in 1972, took a broader view of society. And “Ngā Tau ki Muri: Our Future,” a colorful book published in 2013, focusing on environmental degradation in rural New Zealand.
As Ms Westra’s archive grew and she became more famous in the New Zealand art world, she began exhibiting her work more widely. In 1985, she established a relationship with the National Alexander Turnbull Library, which houses her black and white negatives. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries around the world, including a two-month solo show at the Anastasia Photo gallery in Manhattan beginning in December 2019. It is also the subject of books and documentaries.
Mrs. Westra is survived by her three children, Erik John Westra, Lisa Christina van Hulst and Adrian Jacob van Hulst; six grandchildren; and her half-sister, Yvonne van Westra.
In 2013, Ms Westra went on a six-week trip around New Zealand with Mr Alsop, her gallery owner, during which she revisited many of the communities she had photographed in the 1960s and 1970, including the village where she was. took the pictures for “Washday at the Pa.”
Spending a week in each place, she held exhibitions and sent back many of her images to her subjects and their descendants.
Mr Alsop said in a phone interview: “It’s like bringing the past to the present through photographs. “That’s really what we came to do.”
