Susanne Helene Ford (19 March 1943 – 6 November 2009)[1] was an Australian feminist photographer who started her arts practice in the 1960s.
[7] Ford had a continuing interest in Indigenous issues, travelling widely and photographing in remote areas of Central Australia.
She moved between Bathurst Island and the Barunga Festival (Northern Territory, Sydney and Melbourne) to photograph events connected to the bicentenary of Australia.
[9] 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 the late 1960s Ford created several bodies of work that contained simplex montages, photograms and layers negatives, received hours of darkroom experimentation.
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.
[clarification needed] Ford travelled each winter to Byron Bay, in New South Wales, making many friends and working on art projects.
Her experimentation with technique and media including not only photography but film, video, painting, drawing and later printing was also connected, from the very beginning, by interest in the politics of representation.
[6] Ford was one of two female to commence photographic studies in the newly established Certificate of Photography course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1960.