Max Oettli
Ans Westra: A life in photography by Paul Moon (Massey University Press, 2024), 328pp, $49.99
Everyone seems to have an Ans Westra story to tell. Mine involves Westra swearing in Dutch in the tub of my dark bathroom while standing barefoot in broken glass from a busted lightbulb one chilly Dunedin predawn morning. So one surmises her biographer Paul Moon would have had an overload of anecdotal information to consider, and much of the work on his authoritative bio would have been essentially cutting away the undergrowth of scrub—or gossip or what you will—to get to the heartwood of her remarkable life.
She was precious, tall and conspicuous, a kauri of the forest, while her output was huge, remarkable, and even overwhelming. She courted a number of controversies, not all of her own making, as late twentieth-century New Zealand history swirled around her. Her archive is an iconographic backbone for any sweeping study of the 1960s to the 2000s in this country. Many photographs have become classic, defining images with a quality and poise rarely achieved by her contemporaries. They’re packed with instinctive energy and factual details that ensure they will live on long past her lonely death last year.
Moon, the historian, has had the patience to stare hard at her work and the skill to describe it evocatively. Here, he is looking at a Westra photograph of James K. Baxter that shows him in his last year—a time of manic and ubiquitous activity—preaching in a Catholic church. (And Westra, too, was busy—as Moon says, it was for her a ‘professionally productive but personally tumultuous period’.)
The black and white photograph is a ‘study in religiosity and light. The image is dominated by the white walls and ceiling of the church’s interior and the altar, itself a stark white in the light from the adjacent windows. Far from the embracing aura of white that had become a cliché in religious art, this white is lifeless and cold.’ Moon writes of the foreground showing ‘a counterbalance by the backs of rows of dark timber pews … a soft dark blur that contrasts with the sharp whites’. Baxter is standing at the lectern, modestly dressed, hands clasped and looking down at the bible from which he is reading. ‘His long hair, his draping beard and his gaunt physique convey a John the Baptist-type impression. Above his right shoulder is a standard statue of Christ with a Sacred Heart. The comparison between the two is sacrilegious.’ (Well, yes, but the sacrilegious pose is one that Baxter, by the early 1970s, was working to the hilt.)
‘Baxter’s public image was at its height at this time,’ Moon continues, ‘and his fame attracted followers.’ I’m a little dubious about this implied cult-like following; certainly not in my circles, including the fucked-up junkies I knew. Moon goes on to point out that the church in which Baxter is reading is essentially empty: ‘This scene, in which the crowds have abandoned Baxter, foreshadowed the collapse of his community, and his own imminent demise.’ Moon cannot resist a little sermonising of his own. May we suppose his followers were too stoned to attend church?
He includes Westra’s comment, ‘I can’t say he was a fraud’, on which he then elaborates: ‘[but she] could see that Baxter was all too human, and possessed the frailties and shortcomings that went with that’. To borrow a line from Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet was ‘human, all too human’. But if Baxter was a man with ‘frailties and shortcomings’, Westra also had ‘a knack for choosing wrong partners’. She was in a messy and turbulent relationship with Barry Crump for a while, and we somewhat pruriently learn of the conception of their son Erik, involving a great deal of booze and her VW Beetle pulled over in the chilly hills of Wellington. The VW, which she imported from the Netherlands in 1966, was a good and faithful servant hauling her hither and yon. VWs were a miracle of Porsche design that never broke down. And she’s never without her equally reliable Rolleiflex camera.
The first chapter of this book, dealing with Westra and the German occupation of Holland that lasted until her tenth year, is diligent and illuminated by snippets from Moon’s unique taped conversations, made in February 2022. We learn a few details about the family business and of her terror at seeing an infant being crushed by a German Panzer. Inevitably, there was the traumatic numbness that gripped many Netherlanders from that generation, post-War. ‘You saw nothing,’ her mother told four-year-old Ans, who, in fact, remembered what she witnessed. Later, she carried messages for the Dutch Resistance.
However, what really counted was her gradual discovery of photography. The legendary Rolleiflex was, in those days, the world standard in quality and reliability. Above all, it has a mirror-reflex viewing set-up, which allows us photographers to photograph discreetly through a Zeiss lens without having the camera distractingly in front of our faces. I’ve worked with them myself as a press photographer in the 1960s and 1970s, often with a powerful flashgun humming and tunnelling through semi-darkness. The frontal but head-down style this camera allowed, both non-confrontational and all-seeing at the same time, created a distinctive ambience around a lot of her early work in this country.
In his account, Moon writes about the fractious relationship between Westra’s parents and various traumatic goings-on in some detail. As an only child, and a slightly eccentric one, somewhat isolated, Westra possessed the traits of one who was born to watch, to use their eyes. She is described as becoming intensely interested in the world around her in her teens, ‘when some of [her] earlier loneliness receded in the face of her curiosity about people’.
The famous Family of Man photography exhibition in the mid-1950s, a gigantic show of over 500 images organised by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, came at an impressionable time for her and was vitally important in shaping her views. It was curated by Edward Steichen, who wanted to promote liberal democracy, love and freedom—a harmonious vision of humanity—after the traumas of World War II. According to Steichen: ‘The people in the audience looked at the pictures, and the people in the pictures looked back at them. They recognized each other.’ The exhibition toured the world for eight years, attracting millions of visitors. Moon does not really have room to fit in the dissenting discourse articulated by the likes of cultural critic Alan Sekula a few decades later, which asserted that the show represented ‘a capitalist cultural tool levering world domination at the height of the Cold War’.
The show came with a well-produced but relatively cheap catalogue. Westra bought this and had enough change left over to buy her first Rolleiflex, a life-defining investment. She also bought Ed van der Elsken’s We Are Seventeen, a remarkable photo book created by someone who was himself seventeen. The style of photography has very little in common with Westra’s work, though, at least at this stage of her career. She became very interested in photo books and picture page layouts in what was a golden age of magazine and book production.
After a few complications involving her birth father scuttling out of Indonesia to New Zealand as Dutch colonial rule there came to an end, Westra journeyed by passenger ship to join him in Auckland on a working holiday in 1956. She had a fairly unpleasant time in his cramped and uptight Glen Eden house and was pushed into getting various short-term jobs. One of these involved working with fellow Dutch migrants Kees and Tina Hos in their pioneering New Vision Gallery, and this provided her with initial contacts in the local visual arts scene. Subsequently, a shift to Wellington, a city she never really left, enabled her, in Moon’s words, ‘to expand the boundaries of her identity. New Zealand was becoming a place of refuge from unresolved aspects of her past’.
Moon writes glowingly about her collaboration with the Māori quarterly journal Te Ao Hou; New World, a connection that proved long-lived and extremely fruitful and positive. Here, her foreignness stood her in good stead, allowing access to many situations where Kiwi Pākehā, in the rigid caste system of the day, would have occupied a somewhat awkward place. That situation was to evolve over the half-century of her activity, but her status as a curious foreigner with a funny accent helped. Historian Robert Chapman once mused about the fact that a large percentage of New Zealand’s most notable photographers were of foreign origin (including Marti Friedlander and, as it happens, this reviewer), a thesis that was subsequently elaborated by art historian Leonard Bell in his 2017 book Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the arts in New Zealand, 1930–1980.
In any case, her early Wellington period is studded with important names of people who recognised her potential, helped her on her way, and often remained lifelong friends, including Eric Schwimmer, Margaret Orbell, Eric Geiringer, Theo Schoon, Desmond Kelly and John Turner (a stalwart of the Wellington Camera Club in those halcyon days).
Early on, Westra began learning te reo Māori. There were not many courses around then, but she formed friendships with Māori on the Ngāti Pōneke marae in Wellington. Which leads to the business around Washday at the Pa. In an interview, Moon mentioned that this photo book was his first encounter with Westra’s work. And it was mine too. Here’s a personal memory: It is August 1964. I have come home from high school, and I’m putting on my shabby clothes and Skellerup gumboots to go out and feed the cows their daily ration of hay on the family farm. Mum has just arrived, too, having accepted a ride home from Martha Pihama. She’d been to a Māori Women’s Welfare League meeting, where she was active as treasurer for the Raglan County branch. She doesn’t say much, and when we come in from tending to the herd, I notice a booklet on the kitchen bench: Washday at the Pa. I leaf through it; I have been active in photography for a few months, so I’m interested. It looks OK but a tad babyish for me as a serious adolescent. Mum tells us that the League is debating getting it banned because of the denigrating impression it gives of Māori people. We have three pā in our district; some people live in shacks, others in the splendid new Department of Māori Affairs houses. No one is rich, including us, by the way, and the other Pākehā cow-cockies around us are saddled with merciless mortgages. To me, the kids cheerfully making do in their whare seem like the younger brothers and sisters of some of my schoolmates.
Mum firmly announces that as a Pākehā she is not going to join in the debate about this, but we are all a tad nonplussed when the ban and the pulping of the books actually takes place. As we have more important things to think about, this incident soon passes into oblivion. I occasionally looked at the book. I wonder where that copy is now? A collector’s item; it should be worth a few hundred bucks.
Moon carefully follows the meandering history of Westra and her Māori friends as a new generation arises, and the sense of betrayal and awareness of other tensions between the two peoples, colonisers and colonised, becomes a constant background simmering. Her ties with Ngāti Pōneke and other iwi stood her in good stead throughout her life. Certain currents run deep. However, the intrusive, voyeuristic nature of photography, about which much has been written, and the sacrality of the human presence have often led to contradictory paradigms.
In an article that Moon quotes quite extensively, Westra tells of her patient efforts to photograph people generally and Māori in particular. Initially, her views echoed the institutional and colonial attitudes of those in authority in mid-twentieth-century New Zealand.
Of the book Māori, published in 1967, Westra says: ‘We did the book because in those days we felt the Māori were a dying people—through marrying and integration. It would just happen naturally that Māori would disappear. And no one was really documenting their culture. I’ve often found that things vanish very quickly. So it is that making, creating, pinpointing history. A photograph is a lasting document.’
Her views gradually became a little more nuanced as society’s attitudes themselves evolved. Warm relatedness and sympathetic detachment mark her later work: ‘Still, the outsider angle is of importance. In the 1960s I didn’t fall under any of the restrictions that Māori faced themselves—because of their history and their position within the land. [They] were very good to photograph as they would ignore me eventually.’
Westra felt that by being self-effacing, she could make herself invisible. When shooting, she would be completely concentrated on the complex manipulations and compositions her work required. This harked back to her childhood behaviour of trying not to be noticed.
In the 1980s and 1990s she documented some tense and difficult situations, although Moon tells us she steered well clear of demos, especially during the 1981 Springbok Tour protests. But her photos of Māori gangs partying, not to mention the very explicit adolescent sex instruction stuff she shot for Alister Taylor’s book Under the Plum Trees, reveal her as a serious and focused professional maker of memorable images. In a changing cultural climate, she began to occasionally find herself turned away from situations she was familiar with on marae and in other gathering places. This would have hurt, but she shrugs it off.
In her last few decades Moon covers what we could call her years of struggle. There’s economic and emotional hardship and a brush with mental disorder, and these he writes about in a carefully approached and balanced way. There are competitions not won, rivalries between her and others, and book projects going under. Nevertheless, her life is threaded with implacable activity. She is criticised for not changing her straightforward visual style, in which she lets the subject essentially dictate the composition of her work, and she is faithful, on the whole, to black and white. She preferred the chromatic simplicity of the grey scale to the occasionally intrusive spectrum of colours. In this she differs from Brian Brake, who became an undoubted master of the colour palette. Westra makes an amusing reference to him, swanning around at Turangawaewae in 1961, with an assistant following him carrying a multi-coloured umbrella.
Yet her public reputation remained high, and the output of her work was unstoppable. Luit and Jan Bieringa made the fine documentary Ans Westra: Private Journeys/Public Signposts in 2006, and, of course, they also published the monumental Handboek a couple of years earlier. This is a compilation of beautifully produced Westra photos and critical texts on Westra, from which Moon’s publisher borrows Neil Pardington’s graphic presentation. By this time, she is having her vast archive scanned at the National Library, with help from staff at Te Papa, along with the assistance of her half-sister Yvonne and that of curator and gallerist David Alsop, a supporter of her work.
One name doesn’t figure in the biography. In the last years, Westra had a lot of help not only from Yvonne but also from fellow photographer Julian Ward, who essentially assisted with her logistics and took her out for a weekly shopping stint in Petone and lunch by the waterfront. He kept in touch with her through the difficult Covid period as well. Moon has said that there will inevitably be gaps in his account. I wouldn’t disagree, and there are some small errors as well. But the book’s a great read for all that.
MAX OETTLI was born in Switzerland in 1947. He was raised and educated in New Zealand and is a photographer, teacher and writer. He and his wife live between Wellington and Geneva. They became close friends of Ans Westra in the early 1970s.
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