Darkroom Treasures (Still series)

In the summer of 2017-18, Annemarie Hope-Cross made a series of photogenic drawings that responded to her feelings and responses to undergoing treatment for cancer. Hope-Cross describes her Still series of prints, as slow photography – invoking the pace of her own life and also the method of employing one of the earliest processes in the history of photography, where each of her salt paper negatives required an eight hour exposure in the autumn light of Central Otago. Hope-Cross uses an antique ‘mousetrap camera’, similar to the kind used by William Henry Fox-Talbot in the 1830s, to expose her negatives. Annemarie Hope-Cross’s photographs connect people and events infused with the perspective of illness and inheritance. They are emotional and physical - related to life experiences, family history and the history of photography. They are the result of the process of making art in conjunction with the rhythms of illness and observations of the maker’s immediate world.