Ans Westra
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Ans Westra CNZM |
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|---|---|
| Born |
28 April 1936 Leiden, Netherlands |
| Nationality | New Zealander |
Ans Westra, CNZM (born 28 April 1936 in Leiden) is a self-taught New Zealand photographer, with an interest in Māori. Her prominence as an artist and author was most amplified by her 1964 piece Washday at the pa. Westra left the Netherlands for New Zealand in 1957.
Born Anna Jacoba Westra in 1936 in Leiden, Netherlands, the only child of Pieter Hein Westra and Hendrika Christina van Doorn.
In 1953 Ans moved to Rotterdam and studied at the Industrieschool voor Meisjes, graduating in 1957 with a Diploma in Arts and Craft teaching, specialising in artistic needlework.
Ans was exposed to photography as a teenager by her stepfather. A visit in 1956 to the international exhibition The Family of Man in Amsterdam, together with a book by Joan van der Keukens, Wij Zijn 17 (We Are Seventeen), inspired Ans' first photographic documentation, which featured her fellow students.
Her obsession with capturing the world through a camera was instilled after encountering the famous Family of Man exhibition in Amsterdam. This utopian, quasi-anthropological exhibition, curated by MoMA’s Edward Steichen, toured the world from 1955 to 1963, and was a major influence on Westra’s work, as was precocious teenager Joan van der Keuken’s 1955 photobook Wij Zijn 17 (We Are 17), which depicts the lives of post-war Dutch youth.
In 1957 Ans travelled to New Zealand to visit her father who had earlier immigrated. She stayed in Auckland and worked for eight months at Crown Lynn Potteries.
In 1958 she moved to Wellington, where she joined the Wellington Camera Club and worked in various local photographic studios. In 1960, Ans received international recognition winning a prize from the UK Photography magazine for her work entitled Assignment No. 2. That same year Ans had her first photograph published in New Zealand on the cover of Te Ao Hou, a magazine published by the Department of Māori Affairs. In 1962 she began working as a full-time, freelance documentary photographer. Much of her early work was for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou magazine.
In 1964 her school bulletin Washday at the Pa was published, and distributed to primary school classrooms throughout New Zealand. Soon after its release the journal was withdrawn by order of the Minister of Education at the request of the Maori Women’s Welfare League. Later in 1964 Washday at the Pa was privately republished by the Caxton Press.
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