When a black-and-white photograph of a person and a girl sitting on a patterned couch outdoors an previous weatherboard home appeared on a billboard in central Wellington not too long ago, Arthur Uruamo’s cellphone lit up.
“Lots of people have rung me about that photograph,” Uruamo tells the Guardian.
“Folks recognised me and mentioned: ‘hey Arthur, I’m certain that’s you in that photograph’, and I mentioned, ‘it’s me’!”
Taken in 1972, the photograph exhibits Uruamo, then 20, and his cousin attending the annual 25 January celebrations at Rātana Pā – a Māori church and motion within the decrease North Island. Uruamo remembers the photograph being taken however didn’t realise the girl holding the digital camera was considered one of New Zealand’s best-known social documentary photographers, Ans Westra.
Westra died final 12 months, aged 86, forsaking greater than 300,000 photographs of New Zealand life over many many years.
The picture of Uruamo as a younger man on the billboard was put up as a part of a marketing campaign being run by Westra’s household and Suite Gallery in Wellington to determine 1000’s of individuals the photographer captured over her lifetime.
Whereas Uruamo had at all times identified concerning the photograph, after seeing it on the billboard he contacted the gallery they usually had been lastly capable of determine him.
The marketing campaign to seek out the topics in Westra’s pictures will proceed over the subsequent few months. A choice of Westra’s images, taken in Wellington through the Seventies and Eighties, will seem on social media, billboards, stickers and light-weight projections across the metropolis. With the general public’s assist, the mission hopes to determine and catalogue the numerous unnamed individuals within the photographs. Persons are requested to contact the gallery if they’ve data, with the hopes of connecting any residing topics.
Westra died final 12 months, aged 86, forsaking greater than 300,000 photographs of New Zealand life over many many years. {Photograph}: Ans Westra
Westra was born within the Netherlands and moved to New Zealand within the Nineteen Fifties. Over 64 years, she documented life in New Zealand and abroad, with the photographs now housed in a big vault in Wellington. A choice of these are being digitally catalogued by means of the Nationwide Library of New Zealand.
Her work different extensively – from landscapes and road life, to gangs and the home on a regular basis – however she is maybe finest identified for capturing Māori communities at a time of nice social change, which prompted each acclaim and controversy.
Whereas Westra developed shut and enduring relationships with many communities, she didn’t at all times file the identities of these she photographed.
“Her technique was very a lot within the background, observing,” says Westra’s daughter, Lisa van Hulst. “She wouldn’t at all times cease and write down who was in her images – that might have interfered together with her work.”
Now – notably within the digital age – it’s usually considered as finest follow to file the identities of individuals in images, Suite Gallery proprietor David Alsop says, including a part of mission’s purpose is to carry Westra’s work in step with fashionable requirements.
“For all Ans did, she could possibly be criticised for not having recorded the names of the individuals – so that is … making an attempt to finish the work for her and never only for her, however for the individuals within the images and future generations.”
Alsop and Van Hulst hope the Wellington marketing campaign will encourage others across the nation to dip into the Nationwide Library catalogue, the place they’ll search Westra’s archive for a selected time and place, and doubtlessly determine themselves or others.
Westra noticed her work as one thing that “belonged to the nation” and ought to be accessible, Van Hulst says. “[Identification] provides a depth to the gathering that elevates it from being simply images to 60 years of New Zealand historical past.”
For Uruamo, the photograph of himself as a younger man is extra than simply an historic doc: “it’s a narrative.”
“It’s the identical for me as it’s for others who see their photograph – it brings again some good reminiscences.”
In Uruamo’s case, it additionally introduced again love.
The 12 months his photograph was taken by Westra, an unknown lady who favored the look of Uruamo boldly walked as much as him and held his hand, however the younger pair misplaced contact after the Rātana celebrations. Fifty years later, the identical lady noticed Westra’s {photograph} of Uruamo on Fb and recognised the person she had fancied a few years earlier. She requested if anybody might determine the person, which resulted within the pair reconnecting.
They’re quickly to married, Uruamo says.
“She noticed that image and he or she fell in love once more.”
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