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Overview
This photograph was taken in 1971 by Ans Westra at the tangi (funeral) of Māori opera singer Inia Te Wiata. The tangi was held in the whare whakairo (carved meeting house) called Raukawa, which is located in the township of Ōtaki. Westra's black and white photograph depicts a group of people waiting in the cold wind, some of whom bend and bow in mourning.
Images of Māori
Westra began photographing people in 1961, and this became a lifelong vocation. Through the magazine Te Ao Hou (the new world) and its editor Margaret Orbell, Westra became deeply involved in photographing Māori, and these images were published in the magazine and then later collected in a book called 'Maori' (with James Ritchie). By the 1970s Westra had moved away from what was an almost exclusive interest in Māori people in the 1960s, but Inia Te Wiata Funeral, Ōtaki demonstrates that she remained engaged with the culture that had first caught her interest a decade earlier.
The grand tradition of documentary photography
Westra has remained in the humanist documentary tradition, little concerned with formal issues. She zeroes in - with warmth, sympathy, and respect - on content, on her subjects as people. She is a photographer of gesture: the way a person stands, the look on someone's face, how one person touches another. While the title of Inia Te Wiata Funeral, Ōtaki provides basic information about where and when the photograph was taken, Westra typically provides little factual information about what is going on and who the people are. Her photographs are intended to be more than a document of a specific event, and Inia Te Wiata Funeral, Ōtaki uses the tangi as an opportunity to create an enduring record of grief, mourning, and the variety of human emotions and responses in times of sadness.