Book Review: Handboek - Ans Westra Photographs

Book Review: Handboek - Ans Westra Photographs

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.

8XAPR16

OUR PERSONAL CHOICES THIS MONTH

Des Visages, des figures

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY VINCENT BALDENSPERGER

““...Des visages, des figures,
dévisagent, défigurent,
des figurants à effacer,
des faces A, des faces B,
j’ai douté des détails, jamais du don des nues...””
— Noir Désir

Un temps observateur, je dévisage en silence. Chaque séance reste une rencontre improvisée soutenant l'inattendu, sans artifices, hors des figurations. Chacun se dévoile un instant seulement. Mon regard comme seul témoin. Que reste t-il de chaque aparté ? Les forces des uns, les interrogations des autres, les retenues parfois, celles qui libèrent les émotions. En souvenir, mes remerciements à chacune et chacun pour la richesse de chaque découverte.

J'ai douté des détails, jamais du don des nues.

--- 

At times observer, I stare in silence. Every session improvised, holding onto the unexpected—without frills or artifice. Each one revealed for a single instant, my gaze as sole witness. What remains? The strengths of some, the questions of others; hesitations that may free emotions. I give thanks to each and every one for the richness of these discoveries.

I have doubted details…never the gift of nakedness.

Blue in the Face

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY BERT STEPHANI

At first sight the Cuban Revolution and it’s heroes are still going strong in Havana. But it doesn’t take much time nor a trained observer to see it’s often no more than a thin layer of revolutionary varnish. The Cuban people, particularly the younger generation, don’t want to live in heroic isolation anymore, they want to be part of the world. 

It’s only very recently that you can access the internet from Cuba. Connections are slow when they work at all and there are only a couple of wifi hotspots around the city. But the internet is clearly here to stay. Every night and on weekend days, Cubans with tablets, laptops and smartphones (often donated by relatives abroad) flock to these hotspots to Skype with family members in the US and other parts of the world. Faces lit up by the blue glow of their devices hang on to the images and sounds from outside the boundaries of their island.

Masks

Photography and Text By Derek Clark

Masks - we all wear them. They may not look like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction, but we all have different ones for different people we meet. There's the 'meet the in-laws for the first time' mask. Or 'I'm a really conscientious worker' mask. Most of the time we don't even realise we've switched masks, it's just so seamless and we slip from one to the other as the social occasion requires. These are the harmless masks we all use at some point.

But there's a more sinister mask out there. The one that stands up and preaches on a Sunday about good and evil, telling you how you must lead a good life and resist sin. But behind that mask might be your kids worst nightmare. Or Jimmy Savile, the UK TV presenter with a knighthood from the Queen. You know, the one that was always eager to do lots of charity work for the children, and actually had keys to a wing of mental hospital. That mask was almost transparent, but it worked for many many years. People saw through it, but if it's worn with confidence it will work.

Thankfully the mask you see here is the harmless kind. The kind you buy on eBay after consuming a bit too much alcohol. The guy wearing it is an open book who shares everything, without restraint. Sometimes too much.

He has less masks than anybody else I know.

ID

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY PATRICK LAROQUE

“The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.”
— Sigmund Freud - New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, (1932)

(Sur)faces

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHARLENE WINFRED

A meditation on texture

Geoff

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN MULLINS

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts, and/or demonstrating an art. Geoff is an artist.  Geoff is also a dear friend, a conversationalist extraordinaire, a source of knowledge, inspiration and ideas and facts.

For this month's issue I decided to use the Fuji X-Pro2 to create a video mini-documentary about Geoff.  He's a creative that creates with any medium, but he will tell you that he favours oil for his painting. He has a shed that he works in and it's a creative cavern full of trinkets, icons and worldly collections that help him remain inspired by his surroundings.

Two minutes of Geoff...

Faces In The Mix

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY FLEMMING BO JENSEN

“Last night a DJ saved my life

”There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
’Cause I can do it in the mix.””

Waiting for the Parade

Waiting for the Parade

Sydney's Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is known around the world for the outstanding costumes and colour in the annual parade down Oxford Street; but I've found the audience is quite often as impressive as the participants.

Being such a popular event, it brings people from around the globe - indeed, I was saying to a neighbour that the spare bedrooms of Sydney are filled to bursting, that weekend - and an incredible volume of feathers, fake fur, wigs, and most of all glitter are put to use in ways they may or may not have been designed for...