Athol McCredie reviews Ans Westra: A life in photography by Paul Moon for the New Zealand Journal of History:
‘THE DUTCH-BORN Ans Westra (1936–2023), was a driven, sometimes polarizing photographer, who was a senior figure in the strand of documentary photography that emerged in New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. To date, the substantial 2004 Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs, published by Luit Bieringa and edited by Lawrence McDonald, has been the authoritative source on Westra. It is a handsomely illustrated, critical evaluation of Westra’s work. However, its writing is more around than about her, and lacks an explicit narrative of her life. Paul Moon’s new work provides a welcome biographical complement to this publication.
Throughout his book, Moon diligently charts the key projects of Westra’s long photographic career. Much will be familiar to close followers of her work, but he also brings in previously unknown, or lesser known, personal stories. These include her mental breakdown and hospitalization in 1991, and the unconventional upbringing of her children as she focused on her photography (where dinner could be served anytime from late afternoon to after 9pm). There were the many years of frugal living that saw her family foraging food on occasions and, when travelling to photograph, Westra routinely sleeping in her cramped VW Beetle. Much of the information on Westra’s lifestyle reveals the extent to which taking photographs bordered on an addiction, a psychological need, against which everything else, including children or partners, came second.
Early in the book, Moon says that it is designed as a corrective to misrepresentations of her work. He does not spell out what these misrepresentations are, but certainly there have been many who felt that her work appropriated and exploited Māori for her own purposes. These complaints go back to 1964, when Westra’s ‘Bulletin for Schools’ booklet Washday at the Pa was withdrawn and destroyed by the government following angry protests from the Maori Women’s Welfare League. The league felt that the booklet’s portrayal of a Māori family living in poverty reinforced a racist stereotype that was unhelpful in its efforts to improve the living standards of Māori.
Moon takes pains to show Westra’s side of the argument. He repeatedly makes the point that she generally photographed with the blessing of her subjects and was well accepted in te ao Māori (where perhaps her outsider status in Pākehā New Zealand as an immigrant was to her advantage). With Washday, she was invited into the home and photographed there with no specific intention – the booklet idea only came later. She arranged for the family to be paid a fee, for which they were very grateful, and they were always more than happy with the booklet, coming to regard it as a taonga decades later. By this time, Westra had also made peace with the Maori Women’s Welfare League.’
Read the rest of the review here.
