When a black-and-white photo of a man and a woman sitting on a patterned sofa outside an old weatherboard house appeared on a billboard in central Wellington recently, Arthur Uruamo’s phone lit up.
“A lot of people have rung me about that photo,” Uruamo tells the Guardian.
“People recognised me and said: ‘hey Arthur, I’m sure that’s you in that photo’, and I said, ‘it is me’!”
Taken in 1972, the photo shows Uruamo, then 20, and his cousin attending the annual 25 January celebrations at Rātana Pā – a Māori church and movement in the lower North Island. Uruamo recalls the photo being taken but did not realise the woman holding the camera was one of New Zealand’s best-known social documentary photographers, Ans Westra.
Westra died last year, aged 86, leaving behind more than 300,000 images of New Zealand life over many decades.
The image of Uruamo as a young man on the billboard was put up as part of a campaign being run by Westra’s family and Suite Gallery in Wellington to identify thousands of people the photographer captured over her lifetime.
While Uruamo had always known about the photo, after seeing it on the billboard he contacted the gallery and they were finally able to identify him.
The campaign to find the subjects in Westra’s photos will continue over the next few months. A selection of Westra’s photographs, taken in Wellington during the 1970s and 1980s, will appear on social media, billboards, stickers and light projections around the city. With the public’s help, the project hopes to identify and catalogue the many unnamed people in the images. People are asked to contact the gallery if they have information, with the hopes of connecting any living subjects.
Westra was born in the Netherlands and moved to New Zealand in the 1950s. Over 64 years, she documented life in New Zealand and overseas, with the images now housed in a large vault in Wellington. A selection of these are being digitally catalogued through the National Library of New Zealand.
Her work varied widely – from landscapes and street life, to gangs and the domestic everyday – but she is perhaps best known for capturing Māori communities at a time of great social change, which prompted both acclaim and controversy.
While Westra developed close and enduring relationships with many communities, she did not always record the identities of those she photographed.
“Her method was very much in the background, observing,” says Westra’s daughter, Lisa van Hulst. “She wouldn’t always stop and write down who was in her photographs – that would have interfered with her work.”
Now – particularly in the digital age – it is generally viewed as best practice to record the identities of people in photographs, Suite Gallery owner David Alsop says, adding part of project’s aim is to bring Westra’s work in line with modern standards.
“For all Ans did, she could be criticised for not having recorded the names of the people – so this is … trying to complete the work for her and not just for her, but for the people in the photographs and future generations.”
Alsop and Van Hulst hope the Wellington campaign will inspire others around the country to dip into the National Library catalogue, where they can search Westra’s archive for a specific time and place, and potentially identify themselves or others.
Westra saw her work as something that “belonged to the nation” and should be accessible, Van Hulst says. “[Identification] adds a depth to the collection that elevates it from being just photographs to 60 years of New Zealand history.”
For Uruamo, the photo of himself as a young man is more than just an historical document: “it’s a story.”
“It’s the same for me as it is for others who see their photo – it brings back some good memories.”
In Uruamo’s case, it also brought back love.
The year his photo was taken by Westra, an unknown woman who liked the look of Uruamo boldly walked up to him and held his hand, but the young pair lost touch after the Rātana celebrations. Fifty years later, the same woman saw Westra’s photograph of Uruamo on Facebook and recognised the man she had fancied many years earlier. She asked if anyone could identify the man, which resulted in the pair reconnecting.
They are soon to be married, Uruamo says.
“She saw that picture and she fell in love again.”
