Would it be improper to suggest that one of the most striking images in this new biography of the legendary Ans Westra was not made by her? It’s on the book’s cover, a compelling close-up of Westra gazing straight at the camera, one held by Wellington photographer Adrienne Martyn.
The photo – and the book – acquire an added patina of solemnity because Westra died last year, aged 86.
Martyn shot the photo in Westra’s Wellington home in 1987 for her Artist Portraits series commissioned by the National Art Gallery (since merged into Te Papa). She says the two women conversed as they moved around Westra’s Karori house, examining her tiny darkroom before moving on to the bedroom filled with natural light.
“I chose to use the beautiful wardrobe as a backdrop,” Martyn tells the Listener. “We continued our conversation, pausing while I photographed her using window light … She created the portrait as much as I did.”
Westra, who documented nearly seven decades of social change in New Zealand, usually worked in a more spontaneous, unobtrusive way. Her photos, especially her early studies of Māori rural and urban communities, were rarely posed.
But by the time of Martyn’s portrait, she had experienced some great highs and lows in a career that began in Wellington in the 1960s.
Paul Moon, professor of history at the Auckland University of Technology, was working against the clock when he met Westra in her Lower Hutt home in February 2023 to interview her during a single long session. She died a few days later.
He writes that he was struck by her “sincerity and warmth”. But he noticed she was watching him, “looking me up and down as though framing me for a photograph”.
Before he left, he remarked that her life still felt like a mystery, to which she responded: “Good!”
That sense of mystery underpins the biography, with gaps and questions yet to be resolved. But it leaves a strong impression of an indomitable, often lonely woman driven by two forces which sometimes competed: the love of her work, and her responsibilities as solo mother to her three children.
Money was always tight; Westra and the children sometimes had to forage for food. With little welfare support for single mothers until 1973, Westra’s resolve to keep the family together was remarkable.
But there was heartache, too. The father of her first child, Erik, born in 1965, was the writer Barry Crump, who never accepted any responsibility. Moon handles the details of this one-sided relationship, which scarred Westra deeply, with great diplomacy. Her second marriage, which resulted in two more children and lasted for seven difficult years, was also wounding.
But then, she already bore wounds from her childhood, which began in the Netherlands in 1936 – just in time for the arrival of the Germans a few years later – and ended in 1957, when she set sail for New Zealand.
The two chapters that deal with this period, “Origins” and “The Family of Man”, are highly dramatic, set across a turbulent backdrop of war, divorce, her mother’s unsuitable second marriage (to a paedophile) – and salvation in the form of a camera, a foldable Agfa, a gift from her mother.
When Westra arrived here – seeking a reconnection with her father, who had moved here with a new wife and family – she was just 21. When their relationship broke down, she cut her ties and moved to Wellington in 1958, this time truly alone in the world.
Here, Moon writes, the details become vague. “Her own account betrays a tendency to avert her gaze from difficult personal events.”
A string of jobs brought in a minimal income but Westra had a breakthrough in 1960 when she sold two cover photos to Te Ao Hou: The New World, a journal published by the Department of Māori Affairs. One in particular, the September issue, inspired a bold change in the journal’s aesthetic, featuring a lovely Westra close-up of a smiling Māori girl.
Images like these propelled Westra’s career and moved her into a period of unprecedented access to the most important areas of Māori events at a time of changing sensitivities, when many Pākehā appeared to assume an attitude of cultural superiority.
Westra’s admission into sacred places like Rātana Pā and Ringatū Church offered “a fleeting glimpse of an unknown world”, but those rights were soon withdrawn.
Moon makes a fair assessment of Westra presenting a Eurocentric “archetype of indigeneity” in many of her works from this time, including what was seen as a patronising photo-essay for the Department of Education about a boy in Tonga.
Then she really put her foot in it with the School Journal publication in 1964 of Washday at the Pā, based on a series of photos she had taken in Ruatōria the year before. The assumed “poor-but-happy” narrative and images caused widespread outrage, and later that year, the Minister of Education demanded its withdrawal from schools.
A “furious” Westra stood by the book, and she had clearly resolved her conflict with groups like the Māori Women’s Welfare League when a revised version was published by her Wellington dealer, Suite Gallery, in 2011.
“Still,” writes Moon, “Washday at the Pa remained for her an ever-present shadow.”
Washday became a definitive turning-point, after which Westra kept searching for new ways to develop creatively, as well as earn a living.
She had a hard life at times, including a serious mental health breakdown in 1991, but her continuing dedication to her craft was recognised in 1998 when she was awarded a CNZM. In 2007, she was made an Arts Foundation Icon.
Her last assignment was coverage of the 2022 occupation of Parliament grounds, which she abandoned because of its hostile atmosphere.
Last year, Moon said to Westra, “I’ll see you again soon”, which was not to be. However, she lives on in this richly detailed biography, while the National Library holds a digitised archive of thousands of Westra images, accessible to anyone who wants to roam around decades of her incredibly varied and important body of work.
