Anna Jacoba Westra (28 April 1936 – 26 February 2023), known as Ans Westra, was a Dutch-born New Zealand photographer, well known for her depictions of Māori life in the 20th century. Her prominence as an artist was amplified by her controversial 1964 children's book Washday at the Pa. Early life Westra was born in 1936 in Leiden, Netherlands, the only child of Pieter Hein Westra and Hendrika Christina van Doorn. In 1953, Westra moved to Rotterdam and began study at the Industrieschool voor Meisjes. She graduated in 1957 with a diploma in arts and craft teaching, specialising in artistic needlework, and the same year, she left the Netherlands for New Zealand. She became a naturalised New Zealand citizen in 1963. Career Initial interest in photography Westra was exposed to photography as a teenager by her stepfather. A visit in 1956 to the international exhibition The Family of Man in Amsterdam, together with a book by Joan van der Keukens, Wij Zijn 17 (We Are Seventeen), inspired Westra's first photographic documentation, which featured her fellow students. Her obsession with capturing the world through a camera was instilled after encountering the famous Family of Man exhibition in Amsterdam. This utopian, quasi-anthropological exhibition, curated by MoMA’s Edward Steichen, toured the world from 1955 to 1963, and was a major influence on Westra’s work, as was precocious teenager Joan van der Keuken’s 1955 photobook Wij Zijn 17 (We Are 17), which depicts the lives of post-war Dutch youth. In 1957, Westra travelled to New Zealand to visit her father who had earlier immigrated. She stayed in Auckland and worked for eight months at Crown Lynn Potteries. Wellington and professional photography In 1958, Westra moved to Wellington, where she joined the Wellington Camera Club and worked in various local photographic studios. In 1960, Westra received international recognition winning a prize from the UK Photography magazine for her work entitled Assignment No. 2. That same year Westra had her first photograph published in New Zealand on the cover of Te Ao Hou / The New World, a magazine published by the Department of Maori Affairs. In 1962 she began working as a full-time, freelance documentary photographer. Much of her early work was for the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education and Te Ao Hou. On 21 June 1978 she documented the final day of the intervention art Vacant Lot of Cabbages and in