Exhibition organisers hope to identify people in Ans Westra photos

NZ Herald

06-05-2025

She is best known for her work documenting the lives of rural Māori, but her vast archive forms an unmatched record of everyday life in her adopted home during the second half of the 20th century.
These days Westra's archive is managed by her daughter Lisa van Hulst, the middle child of three, and Wellington gallery owner David Alsop.
Alsop said one of the aims of the show, like a similar exhibition in Wellington last year, was to connect with people in the images.
He hoped visitors would recognise friends or relatives, or possibly even themselves, and share names and stories so they could be added to the National Library's records.
'Part of the purpose is to try and gather more information about the people in the photographs, and reach out to whānau connected to the images … Ans' process didn't involve gathering people's names or anything as she went.
'She moved quite quickly and quite freely. So the idea now of her daughter and I is to connect with the people in the photographs, and further complete the meaning of the images.'
Alsop said any information people provided would be invaluable to future researchers or whānau interested in a particular person or event.
'So that's what we're increasingly trying to do … It's to let people know they can do this, and if they do, it becomes a better, more interesting, more significant historical archive for everybody who accesses it.'
Alsop said Westra was a frequent visitor to Northland.
She had close friends in Te Kao and Kaitāia, travelled regularly to Hikurangi, just north of Whangārei, and was a regular at Waitangi Day commemorations in the Bay of Islands.
The earliest photo in the exhibition was taken in 1963; the latest dated to the mid-1980s.
Alsop said Westra's archive was so vast he still did not know exactly how many images were in it.
'It is very, very big. The actual grand total number, we don't know yet, because there's still quite a lot of cataloguing to do.'
Work to digitise the archive, and upload the images to the National Library's website to make them freely available to all, started in 2014.
So far about 80,000 negatives had been digitised with an estimated 70,000 to go.
Another 170,000 or so digital images taken since the 2000s did not have to be scanned, but still needed to be captioned and catalogued.
Alsop said he first met Westra at an exhibition of her work in Leiden, the city midway between Amsterdam and The Hague where she was born in 1936.
They struck up a firm friendship and their families became closely intertwined.
Alsop said Westra's contribution to New Zealand photography was 'unparalleled and extremely significant'.
'The breadth, the consistency, the empathy, the beauty of her photographs show us a glimpse of what it might have been like to be a New Zealander at a particular time and in a particular place … there's no other record so important and so far-reaching for the second half of the 20th century.'
Alsop said Westra had no predetermined ideas about what she was trying to capture.
'She was very honest with what she did, and really just captured people as they went about their lives. Her objectivity, through not being New Zealand-born, probably helped.'
Some of her work was controversial at the time – a publication for distribution to schools, called Washday at the Pa, was withdrawn in 1964 and most copies were pulped – but now her photos were widely admired.
'We're getting a lot of amazing feedback. People are generally really pleased with what Ans did. She can't see that now, but I know she'd be happy to know that we're talking about her work, and that her legacy is being honoured like this.'
Westra was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1998. She died in Wellington, aged 86, in 2023.
Ans Westra: Kerikeri 2025 is on at the Theatre Bar at the Turner Centre, Cobham Rd, Kerikeri. The free exhibition will be open on weekdays and during events throughout May. Thousands of her images can also be viewed on the National Library website.