Ans Westra

Photographer

Ans Westra is one of New Zealand's most esteemed photographers.

View Ans Westra citation, presentation & interview 2007 Icon Awards

Born in 1936 in Leiden, Holland, it was her stepfather's camera that sparked Ans' early interest in photography. In 1953 she moved to Rotterdam and studied at the Industrieschool voor Meisjes. A visit to the international exhibition The Family of Man in Amsterdam, and a book by Joan van der Keukens, Wij Zijn 17 (We Are Seventeen), inspired Ans' first photographic documentation, which featured her fellow students. Ans travelled to New Zealand after graduating in 1957 with a Diploma in Arts and Craft Teaching. A year later, Ans joined the Wellington Camera Club, and worked in various local photographic studios.

Her first international recognition came in 1960 when she won a prize from the UK Photography magazine for her work entitled Assignment No. 2. In 1962, Ans began her professional career as a fulltime freelance documentary photographer, working mainly for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou, a Māori magazine published by the Department of Internal Affairs. This work involved spending the next few years travelling extensively throughout New Zealand and the South Pacific. In 1964 her work appeared in a controversial book, Washday at the Pa, which was withdrawn from primary school classrooms by the Department of Education, following protest action by the Māori Women's Welfare League.

Ans received a Certificate of Excellence from the New York World's Fair The World and Its People in 1964-65. She has received several Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grants for the practice and publication of her work focussing on New Zealand and its society. Māori was published in 1967, followed in 1972 by Notes on the Country I Live In with essays by Tim Shadbolt and James K Baxter. The 1970s and 1980s were spent tutoring for PhotoForum. She was the Pacific regional winner of the Commonwealth Photography Award and travelled to the Philippines, Holland, America and the United Kingdom. She was artist-in-residence at the Dowse Art Gallery and President of PhotoForum. In the 1990s she taught and tutored, had several exhibitions and residencies and travelled to China, Mongolia, Russia, and around Europe, before basing herself in the Netherlands for a year. In 2004 Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs opened at the National Library. Ans was awarded the Companion of the Order of New Zealand Merit (CNZM) for services to photography in 1998.

Ans Westra lives in Wellington.

Westra's initial forays into 'Māori country' to document the fast disappearing traditional customs were as much a case of personal discovery, as an attempt to preserve for posterity the assumed loss of those customs, from Handboek Ans Westra Photographs, Luit Bieringa, 2004, Curator and Co-ordinator.