Ans Westra : A Life in Photography

A woman driven to photograph

In a career that spanned six decades, the Dutch-Kiwi photographer Ans Westra (19362023) made it her life's work to capture the growth of a nation through hundreds of thousands of images. Her photographic catalogue is now widely thought of as a photo album of Aotearoa New Zealand.

This richly illustrated biography interrogates her remarkable and at times controversial practice, and a life that always put photography first.