annemarie hope-cross
Growing up, some of Annemarie’s earliest memories are of watching her Grandfather and Father printing in the Taupo darkroom of her Grandfather Henry Hope-Cross (known as ‘HHC’).
HHC had been a photographer for the RNZAF during WWII, and continued on to become a well-known commercial photographer in the Wairarapa district of New Zealand. Her father David had studied Photographic Engineering in Cologne, Germany, and both of them passed their knowledge and love of things photographic to Annemarie.
After finishing secondary school, Annemarie studied Photographic Arts at Whitecliffe Art School, and worked for a time in commercial photographic studios, prior to deciding that Art Photography was her preferred modus operandi.
In 2011, Annemarie attended two workshops at Lacock Abbey, the home of William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the fathers of photography. Run by world-renowned photo historian and artist Mark Osterman and his wife France Scully Osterman, the ‘Dawn of Photography’ workshop on photogenic drawing was to change the direction of Annemarie’s photographic practice. Annemarie describes the workshop as a light bulb moment; she loved the tactile, hands-on simplicity of this process and of a second workshop – wet plate collodion, especially when it meant spending time outdoors in the garden, waiting for images to expose.
2013 saw a return to Lacock for Annemarie, where she was extremely fortunate to spend time as artist in residence, building a significant body of work of photogenic drawings (in particular the Cloister and Book Mark Series). She enjoyed also a daguerreotype workshop with Mike Robinson.
Annemarie now works solely with historic photographic processes, creating hand made images resulting from grinding, heating, stirring and pouring chemicals; coating chemicals onto fine art paper, glass or tin; and exposing images outdoors. She enjoys the contemplative nature of these processes, and the inevitable imperfection …for therein lays the beauty of each image, which is impossible to recreate exactly.