The destroyed photos
Photographer Ans Westra looks back on a 60-year career
She’s travelled the length and breadth of New Zealand, but due to failing health, photographer Ans Westra’s viewing pane is far more restricted these days. Once a week her younger sister Yvonne drives her from her Wellington home to the Petone foreshore where they park up so Westra can watch the world go by as she enjoys her favourite chicken and camembert pie. The desire to capture the scenes around her is still there as she points her lens out the car window, but the 82-year-old can no longer immerse herself in the world as much as she’d like.
Her new reality is sad for those who know her best. Earlier this year she fell, breaking her shoulder, further grounding her roving ways. Westra lives alone surrounded by memories of days gone by. The walls feature a few of her own works as well as others by artists she admires. Her magpie tendencies mean every nook and cranny of her home is filled – largely with treasures picked up at garage sales which she still frequents with Yvonne on Saturday mornings when her health allows.
Over the past 60 years, her photographs have captured the development of a nation; the good, the bad and the ugly. Whether it was in the thick of the Springbok Tour protests, observing life as she hitchhiked around her New Zealand homeland or capturing James K Baxter’s tangi at Jerusalem, Westra photographed life as she saw it, and while it was almost certainly unintentional at the time, the amassed images are now regarded as the most significant study of life in New Zealand over the past six decades.
In the early days as a new immigrant she relished the opportunity to immerse herself in the Maori culture of her new home. Ironically, for someone who wanted to capture everyday moments unnoticed, especially Maori culture, Ans Westra’s height and heritage weren’t on her side. Statuesque and Dutch, her desire to be a wallflower was seriously challenged from the get-go – yet somehow she pulled it off and her work gives the viewer the sense that they are an unobtrusive fly on the wall.
Westra arrived in New Zealand from Holland by boat in 1957. She’d come to visit her father who had immigrated earlier. She started out working at Crown Lynn Potteries in Auckland, painting cups, before moving to Wellington where she signed up to a local camera club and soon developed a knack for capturing life through the trusty twin-lens Rolliflex camera which quickly became her constant companion. She says her images came about by ‘‘being quiet, by observing people first, by being open-minded, nonjudgmental and going with the flow’’. In 1964 a series called Washday at the
Pa, featuring a family living in Ruatoria, was distributed to primary classrooms through New Zealand as a reading resource. Shortly after, the Maori Women’s Welfare League protested that it depicted Maori in a bad light and as a result, all copies were withdrawn and guillotined. Ironically it was this series that contains her favourite photo from her career. Taken in the kitchen it depicts two barefoot boys swinging a younger boy in a kete.
‘‘I just love the look of delight on the little boy’s face,’’ says Westra, who still fondly remembers how the family welcomed her into their home and made her feel as if she was part of their whanau – something that gave the resulting images a unique honesty and warmth.
Westra has admitted in the past that the decision to withdraw all copies of the book shocked her. She felt the Welfare League’s claim that her photographs weren’t a true depiction of Maori life at the time contradicted what she was seeing with her own eyes as she travelled around the country.
Westra has received many accolades for her work. In 1998 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for service to photography, in 2007 she was announced as an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon artist and in 2015 she received an honorary doctorate from Massey University in recognition of her long-standing contribution to New Zealand’s visual culture.
A key figure in the long and challenging process of preserving Westra’s work is her friend and agent, David Alsop.
When Alsop first opened his Wellington art gallery {Suite} 10 years ago, he approached Westra to see if she would be interested in him exhibiting some of her prints. He had no idea he would open a Pandora’s box.
‘‘Over the years she’d hand-printed hundreds of images but there were thousands more that were never printed. As I started to learn more about her work I realised that I had something important on my hands and I felt an immediate sense of responsibility. Her images and prints are historical treasures that needed to be seen.’’
When he held his first exhibition of her images, demand from art collectors and those with a sense of nostalgia for ‘‘old’’ New Zealand was high. There were also people who came out of the woodwork who recognised family or relatives in some of the images.
The demand and interest also presented a challenge. As Westra’s print archive dwindled, Alsop was aware that many of those who wanted the images
I always intended images to be available to the public, so in a way they’ve been given back to the people by being there, which is great.
could not necessarily afford to buy them, and where there were never any prints that was impossible anyway. So Alsop made contact with the National Library to see what could be done to allow Westra’s work to be more readily accessible.
The library had established an archive of her negatives several years earlier – but viewers had to squint at tiny proof sheets in a reading room.
Over the past three years a team based at Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull Library have been painstakingly digitising more than 150,000 of Westra’s negatives to ensure they are available for future generations to access. Now those photographs can be viewed on the National Library website – tagged by date and location – and prints from the digitised scans are starting to be produced, prompted by demand.
Westra is delighted the images are now more accessible than ever before – especially for younger generations who can see the changes she’s witnessed.
‘‘Yes, it makes me very happy that negatives are being preserved by the National Library. I always intended images to be available to the public, so in a way they’ve been given back to the people by being there, which is great.’’
She hopes her work is viewed for many more years to come as ‘‘an honest and fair depiction of life in New Zealand’’.
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Westra’s arrival in New Zealand, Alsop is holding his biggest show of her work to date – taking over two floors of his Cuba St gallery. Some photographs –including several colour images – have never been shown publicly before. There will also be original works made by Westra in her darkroom including a few dating back to 1960.
While Westra is unsure whether her health will allow her to be at the opening next month, she is content her life’s work is preserved for future generations – despite the fact she seems to think they might have drawn the short straw.
‘‘There’s been a lot of change. New Zealand now seems more like the rest of the world than it was when I moved here in the late 50s, which isn’t necessarily a good thing.’’
Home: 60 Years of Ans Westra in New Zealand opens at Suite Gallery, Wellington, November 29.
I just love the look of delight on the little boy’s face.
Ans Westra describes her favourite image, right.