| Matakana Pictures Exhibitions Artists |
Ans Westra Photographs provides an in-depth insight into the 45 year photographic journey by one of New Zealand’s most persistent documenters. Her recent publication: Handboek comprises a gallery of Westra’s most revealing and challenging documentary images.
Born in Leiden, the Netherlands, Ans Westra came to New Zealand in 1957. In a few short years she was to commence on her life-long photographic journey documenting the lives and cultures of New Zealanders during a period of cultural, social and generational change.
The comfortable conformity of the late 40s and 50s in New Zealand was about to be disturbed by the increasing postwar arrival of European migrants and, more importantly, the urban shift of Maori, which gained momentum in the 1950s. As a society New Zealand and its citizens were far from prepared to accomodate the difficulties accompanying such a challenge to their homogenous cultural, social and institutional frameworks.
Ans Westra’s arrival in New Zealand coincided with that shift and the resultant changes and tensions which have characterised and continue to characterise New Zealand’s social and cultural evolution.
It was a time when Maori and Pakeha had to interact widely for the first time. This did happen on a street level or such communal events as the Ngaruawahia Regatta,”even if middle or upper middle class New Zealand citizens largely ignored and remained protected from such a situation.” It is in this context that Ans’s early, if not the bulk of her subsequent work needs to be considered.
Some 40 years on Washday at the pa, one of Westra’s many ‘photo-stories’, still continues to loom large in any discussion of her work, if only to illustrate the fraught territory of the documentary tradition.
As Jenny Lomax, has so aptly written: “ Washday at the pa remains a stake in the ground, marking the complexity of race relations in New Zealand”. Perhaps, inadvertently, Ans’s work of that time had become a kind of barometer of a changing relationship between Maori and Pakeha.
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Show Number 9: 13.August - 9.October 2005
My triptych of Cape Reinga shows the three views beyond the lighthouse. This spiritually charged place is also the meeting point of two oceans which creates a visible turbulence.
For many years I have been photographing the landscape in New Zealand in colour.
Colour, because this is what nature is about. More recently an interest in the man-made feel to our landscape has become the dominant element of my work.
The souvenirs series looks at cross-cultural interpretations. The brooches depicting Maori were for instance made in Tsechoslovakia.
With the Kiwi work I look at how we have interpreted our national emblem. This is still an ongoing series of work.
Ans Westra. 20 August 2005 |
