In a career that spanned six decades, the Dutch-Kiwi photographer Ans Westra (1936&– 2023) 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.

WASHDAY AT THE PA, by New Zealand premier photographers Ans Westra, was first published as a photo-story booklet in 1964 by the Department of Education for use in Primary Schools, but all 38,000 copies were withdrawn following a campaign by the Maori Women's Welfare League that it would have a 'detrimental effect' on Maori people - and that the living conditions portrayed within the book were atypical. A second edition of the booklet was published the same years with some images omitted. This edition is a selection of these two editions together with photographs of the washday family taken in 1988, and includes essays by arts critic, journalist and broadcaster Mark Amery detailing the controversy and background of WASHDAY AT THE PA.

THE CRESCENT MOON : THE ASIAN FACE OF ISLAM IN NEW ZEALAND opens new doors into the lives of the largest group of Muslims in New Zealand and in the world as a whole: those of Asian descent. Photographer Ans Westra and writer Adrienne Jansen - armed with a camera and a tape recorder - take a trip through the country, catching up with people in their everyday lives. They meet a very diverse group, ethnically, culturally, and theologically. There are lawyers and farmers, computer trainers and butchers, fourth generation New Zealanders and new migrants. They talk with disarming honesty about the media, about 9/11, about identity, about their faith - but mostly they just talk about who they are and their life in New Zealand today.

This book illustrates the richness of New Zealand's photographic tradition, from nineteenth-century portraits and landscapes to the latest contemporary art photography. It showcases more than 400 photographs from the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

In this handsome book, leading photography curator Athol McCredie tells the story of the beginnings of contemporary photography also known as art photography in New Zealand. Through interviews with the photographers Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Daley, John Fields, Max Oettli, John B Turner, Len Wesney and Ans Westra, and accompanied by an outstanding introductory essay, McCredie shows how the break-through approach of personal documentary photography created a new field of photography in New Zealand that was not simply illustrative but rather spoke for itself and with its own language.

Taking refuge among other teens who are in hiding from a government threatened by their supernatural powers, Ashala covertly practices her abilities only to be captured and interrogated for information about the location of her friends.