Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs

Published by BWX Blair Wakefield Exhibitions with support from PhotoForum, 2004, to coincide with the exhibition tour of Handboek : Ans Westra Photographs.

ISBN 0476008077

300 x 255mm, 224 pages, 125 plates plus illustrations, hardback.

Reviewed by Robert Catto for Kage International Photography Collective

14 April, 2016

In 2005, as part of a major career retrospective and touring exhibition, Ans Westra's Handboek was published - a collection of essays, interviews and images from her career spanning the late 1950s through to just months before the book was released. Curator (and long time friend of Westra's) Luit Beirenga gathered a group of New Zealand's best and brightest commentators to contribute to this, and the essays are both thoughtful and direct - much like Ans' own work.

If you haven't been to New Zealand, and lived there for several years, you most likely won't know the name, or the work. She moved from the Netherlands in the late 1950s, and began working with academic publishers on school books for Kiwi children, recording life as it was lived at the time.

Read full review at Kage International Photography Collective