Sue Ford

Susanne Helene Ford (19 March 1943 – 6 November 2009) was an Australian feminist photographer who started her arts practice in the 1960s.

Sue Ford was born Susanne Helene Winslow on 19 March 1943, in St Kilda, Melbourne.

She was an Australian feminist photographer.

Ford had a continuing interest in Indigenous issues, travelling widely and photographing in remote areas of Central Australia.

In the late 1960s Ford created several bodies of work that contained simplex montages, photograms and layers negatives, received hours of darkroom experimentation.

It was on her return in 1961 that Ford found employment as a delivery girl for Sutcliffe photographers in Melbourne and working as a darkroom assistant.

In 1962, she enrolled in a photography course at RMIT, she was only one of two females in a class of thirty students.

Ford completed only the first year of a three-year course.

She then rented a studio in Little Collins Street, Melbourne with a friend Annette Stephens, a fellow RMIT student and friend.

This was above a small cafe.

Ford also documented her children extensively and experimented with concepts for children's books, pairing images and text in imaginative narrative sequences that were often connected by a theme of escape.

In 1967 her daughter Emma Ford was born.

Then in 1968, her son Ben Ford was born.

The photo collage Man off the moon, c. 1969 critiqued the first moonwalk by NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Using images shot on a television screen, Ford places her hand into the scene, directing the astronauts like a puppet in a way that asserts her own presence and questions intention of the Americans on the lunar landscape.

Ford moved to Dunmoochin, Cottles Bridge for a brief period, then to Laughing Waters Road, Eltham with her spouse Gordon Ford.

Their first home was destroyed by bushfire, and they then moved to Pitt Street in Eltham and built a mud brick studio there including a darkroom, they also conducted a short lived child portrait business at the same time as working for Eltham Film Productions.

In 1970, Gordon built a new mud brick house for the family at Laughing Waters Road.

In 1972 they moved into the new mud brick house at Laughing Waters Road.

She was the first Australian photographer to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1974 with Time Series.

In 1975 Ford moved to Sydney, but travelled regularly back to Melbourne.

In 1980, they returned to Carlton North, Melbourne.

At this time Ford was active as a founding member of Reel Women feminist filmmakers.

A book of her portraits of women 'A Sixtieth of a Second' was published in 1987.

In 1988, she travelled to Bathurst Island, Northern Territory, to conduct photography workshops with Tiwi women.

She moved between Bathurst Island and the Barunga Festival (Northern Territory, Sydney and Melbourne) to photograph events connected to the bicentenary of Australia.

Between 1990 and 1992, Ford's process shifted from direct camera work to a series of collage images.

Each collage was gridded up and each grab section later printed at A3 size to create large format grid images.

She also worked with a series of ink and watercolour paintings related to her impression of the Cook Islands, Bathurst Island and the deserts in the Northern Territory.

In 1991 Ford bought a house in Marlborough Street, Balaclava, Melbourne where she lived until 2009.

She made a second trip to Bathurst Island to work with the Tiwi women in the same year.

Ford died in 2009 in her Balaclava home on 6 November, surrounded by her family and friends.

In 2010, the Sue Ford archive was established.

In 2011 Ford's last major body of work Self Portrait with a Camera, 1960–2006, was exhibited at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne.

It involves a conflation and compression of time.

It includes some of Ford's earliest photographs alongside her most recent and deeply personal yet ordered and objective at the same time.

The earliest photographs in the series are from when Ford was first introduced to the camera.

The earliest photographs are from when Ford was first introduced to the camera.

Ford was given her first camera in her late teens to take with her on a family holiday to Europe.

Her photographs and eclectic practice was displayed in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014.