KEY POINTS:
It's been a top week for one of our most highly regarded photographers, Ans Westra. Her touring exhibition Handboek, which comprises 178 images of New Zealand life over the past 45 years, has just been bought in its entirety by private collectors. Thankfully, the collectors, who wish to remain anonymous, are not going to keep Handboek locked away in a room, never to be seen again.
"The collectors have the passion and foresight to ensure that Ans' celebration of this land and its people endures," says Westra's Auckland dealer Kathlene Fogarty, of FHE Galleries. Handboek has been bought for the benefit of future generations, not for restricted private enjoyment. That's good news as the collection is an important documentation of the growth of the nation over the past half century.
This week also saw the opening in Auckland of the Wellington photographer's new show, Toy-Land, five huge images of tiny toys Westra has found in garage sales and op shops. The toys - two little Maori girls, a "jandal kiwi", another plastic kiwi of dubious origin dressed in Maori garb, and a little lamb toy also dressed in Maori costume - are all just as Westra found them. Someone, the maker or the owner, has dressed them up in plastic tiki, wearing piupiu (flax skirts) and tipare (headbands). The little Maori girls are excessively cute, one with coy lowered eyes, green eye shadow and painted nails, while the other smiles as she gazes to one side.
Kids entering the FHE Galleries head straight for the lamb. One told Fogarty she liked his "naughty" eyes. "He was a Salvation Army find," says Westra. "I placed him in front of the carving to make it more formal. To make the sheep more 'New Zealand', by putting it in a Maori costume, is bizarre."
Westra made the images of the items a couple of years ago, posing them in her "studio" - a light-filled passageway to her laundry - against a backdrop of black fabric and shot them with her twin-lens Rolleiflex. The images were blown up to 1250mm x 1250mm, in the case of The Sheep, and 1470mm x 1240mm for the others.
There is one more image in the show, Prince's Gate, a shot of a picket fence in Rotorua's Government Gardens, decorated with Maori motif.
Westra has been documenting Maori life since she arrived in New Zealand from The Netherlands. "There was the feeling in the 60s that Maori should adapt and do away with the old culture. I have been the documenter of social change in Maori, the full circle, the revival of culture," she said.
That is why she finds these odd little toys amusing yet faintly shocking, as they were made as kitsch objects based on racial stereotypes. Each image has an edition of six and they are reasonably priced, says Fogarty, to attract beginner collectors.
TIKI TOY STORY
What: Toy-Land, by Ans Westra
Where and when: FHE Galleries, 2 Kitchener St, to April 7
