Biography

I am a fourth generation photographer. Both my great grandfathers were active with photography in the late 1800’s. My grandfather, Henry Hope-Cross, was well known in the Wairarapa as a photographer and my father, David, after studying photographic engineering in Cologne, Germany, worked for an international photography company for many years.

It is probably not surprising then that I spent many hours in a darkroom at home whilst growing up in Auckland.

After secondary school, I completed a Diploma in Photographic Arts and worked for a time in commercial photographic studios.

Photography was ‘halted’ in my life at that point as I no longer had access to a darkroom and didn’t know what sort of images I wanted to make. I had retrained and was working as a frontline ambulance officer, keeping busy with my Newfoundland dog.

The desire to make images never left me however, and in 2008 I moved to Alexandra, Central Otago, wanting to live in a small community and to do more photography; I felt that somehow it would happen with my move.

Working with me on the ambulance, as a volunteer, was Eric Schusser, a well known local photographic artist; photography was one of several interests we shared, and… we married three years ago.

During his business travels overseas, Dad had collected and given me a couple of brochures, which I rediscovered after my move to Alex. These were about the very origins of photography, which piqued my interest and led me, in 2011, to attending two workshops at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, the home of England’s first photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot.
Learning the Photographic Drawing process (invented in 1835) was to change the direction of my photographic practice; the workshop was an absolute ‘lightbulb moment’. I fell in love with the tactile, hands-on simplicity of this process and others like it, and realised this was how I wanted to spend my days.

For me, it is an opportunity to spend time outdoors in the garden and sunshine, waiting for images to expose. It’s a contemplative experience, sometimes working without the aid of a camera and enjoying the challenges of nature which are implicit in the images I make.

I was very fortunate to return to Lacock in 2013, spending time as artist in residence, building the second largest body of Photographic Drawings in the world – the largest collection belonging to Fox Talbot himself.

In 2017, after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, my focus has been on my photography. During the darkest times, and with multiple surgeries, chemo and radiation taking their toll, I lie on the bed dreaming of images I want to make and plan new bodies of work. It’s very therapeutic.

During more treatment in 2019, Eric and I produced our first photo book together ‘Still Intrusion’. There are plans afoot to produce a follow up to this publication, which documents our journey together facing the cancer diagnosis, and the images we’ve both made during that time.

I continue making images at home in my darkroom built by Eric, working solely with historic photographic processes; grinding, heating, stirring and pouring chemicals and hand coating paper, glass and tin. Just as when I first learnt the process at Lacock, I am still enthralled by the contemplative nature of these processes, and the inevitable imperfections of a hand made image