[5] In 1956 she was inspired by a visit to the international exhibition The Family of Man in Amsterdam, together with the 1955 book by Johan van der Keuken, Wij Zijn 17 (We Are Seventeen) which depicted the lives of post-war Dutch teenagers.

[1] On 21 June 1978 she documented the final day of the intervention art Vacant Lot of Cabbages[13][14] and in 1979 she photographed the Ben Burn Park Concerts[15] that were part of Summer City (Wellington).

[1] In 1972 Notes on the Country I Live In was published as the result of a project Westra undertook with support from the QEII Arts Council to photograph the people of New Zealand.

Ans Westra: Private Journeys / Public Signposts played at the NZ International Film Festival and was nominated for a Qantas Media Award.

[20] Bieringa who like Westra emigrated to New Zealand from the Netherlands was commissioned by TVNZ to produce a 46 minute version of the documentary for TV One’s Artsville series.

In 2014, the digitization of Westra's archive of negatives held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, came into effect through her representative, Suite Tirohanga.

[12] Westra's print Untitled, from Washday at the Pa, 1963, set a new auction record price at NZ$10,575 at Webb's in Auckland, New Zealand, on 11 June 2015.

The content being through a Pākehā gaze is also criticised including the controversy of Washday at the Pa.[16][26][27] Another criticism was that Westra did not always stop to record the names of the people whose photographs she took.

Photos taken by Westra, appearing on bill boards and on social media in Wellington, encouraged people to get in touch if they knew the identities of the sitters.

[1] Westra was the Pacific regional winner of the Commonwealth Photography Award in 1986, travelling to the Philippines to photograph and then onwards to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and America.

[6] In 2015, Westra received an honorary doctorate from Massey University in recognition of her long-standing contribution to New Zealand’s visual culture.