Dutch-Kiwi photographer Ans Westra was a pioneer of New Zealand documentary photography for more than six decades, taking an estimated 320,000 images; 160,000 of them featuring people.
Now her family, and the managers of the Ans Westra archive, are trying to track down those who feature inher work. The famed photographer died last year, at the age of 86.
Over the coming months, Suite Gallery on Wellington’s Cuba St is holding a series of exhibitions and community initiatives to celebrate the breadth and diversity of Westra’s work, and a citywide campaign to connect with any living subjects.
Westra’s daughter Lisa van Hulst and Suite Gallery director David Alsop together are guardians of the Ans Westra archive, which is now housed on the National Library’s website with catalogued details of locations, dates and people portrayed in the images. The digital archive is an ongoing project, with new image information continually recorded and updated.
As well as having billboards around Wellington encouraging Facebook users to tag and share photos, Van Hulst says they will be projecting images onto locations where they were taken in the hopes of jogging people’s memories, or at least letting them experience a trip to the past.
People photographed at Cuba Mall, Cuba St in 1974. Photo / Supplied / Ans Westra
“There’s just so many iconic images taken, specifically in Wellington, because that’s just where she lived for so long, that being able to put some names to those faces would be amazing and connect back to the whānau.
“Somebody will recognise an auntie, and they’ll go up and they’ll cross the screen, and they’ve got that connection back to someone who’s no longer here that they might not have realised that there was that record of them.
“I’ve got a photograph on my wall at home, one of the first that I got from my mother, of the man who was painting the mural, you might recall it, it was outside The Purple Onion on Vivian St and it was a white lady mural, that was there for a long time, and just behind the person painting the mural there’s a little boy standing there, and I have several sets of people who either believe that they’re the boy or parents who think that’s their little boy.
“I don’t think the dates quite line up, so to be able to actually go ‘oh, that’s the little boy who’s standing there would be lovely, so there’s that breadth, really personal, to just putting people’s names behind the faces.”
Young people pictured at Pigeon Park, Wellington in 1989. Photo / Supplied / Ans Westra
One of Westra’s goals was to set the archive up so that it could be accessed by everyone, Alsop says.
“And it wasn’t until sort of 2013-2014, when we entered into an arrangement with the National Library to start to digitise the negative archive that the possibility of unlimited access to the archive on the internet became a possibility.
“Not surprisingly following on from that, lots and lots of people have contacted us, saying that’s me in that photograph, or that’s my uncle or that was that dog that used to follow me around ... There’s lots of great stories and it’s a great moment for me to have someone ring up and say ‘this is me’.”
People can use filters like dates and locations to search through the negatives archive for specific results.
“So if you knew you were living in Ngāruawāhia in 1963 that’s a good start to find a bit of material about people that you’re undoubtedly going to have known,” Alsop says.
Ans Westra photography in the Philippines, 1986. Photo / Supplied / Ans Westra
He estimates it would take about two to three years of work to finish this cataloguing. But beyond these images, they also hope to celebrate Westra’s other work through more initiatives.
“She’s often pigeon-holed. There’s no doubt she made a significant contribution to photographing New Zealand culture but she also did a lot of other things overseas, Philippines, Netherlands, there’s all the school booklets, there’s her environmental concern which kind of came later on in her life, sort of post-2000, but a lot of that work has never been seen or understood.”
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