EMILY MOSCROP
SYDNEY-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER
Emily Moscrop is a photographer currently operating out of Sydney, NSW. She travels often and is mostly preoccupied with the ways people are impacted by the spaces she finds them in.
MAGIC PERÚ, PERÚ
“I arrived in Perú kind of disastrously. A 20+ hour bus ride had seen the motor’s small septic pipe leak onto my backpack, while I was blissfully unaware upstairs in my seat. I was later kicked out of my hostel dorm and had to put my things through the local laundrette four times before the smell dulled. It was a fairly humbling experience — given that so much of travelling hinges on feeling confident enough to talk to strangers — and almost made me want to leave early. I’m glad I didn’t, though, as Perú held the most magic of my trip.
I’d booked to visit from a small hostel in Medellín, Colombia, after the people I’d been travelling with had flown home. I’d taken stock of my dwindling savings and realised that I couldn’t leave Latin America without seeing Machu Picchu. It lived up to everything I thought it might and more. Parades through the town of Cuzco on Valentine’s Day, setting out on the trail to Machu Picchu from Aguas Calientes (in the dark, with the biggest moths I’ve ever seen fighting for my phone light), and my soul-splintering time in the Amazon rainforest: it was an entire lifetime in just a handful of short weeks.
Everything I photographed there seemed imbibed with its own type of magic, and ever since then I’ve referred to the place as ‘Magic Perú.’”
beach studies, sicily
“The sheer heat of Sicily in August was, naively, something I hadn’t expected, so I spent the majority of my time there in water. I was fascinated by the beach culture of the place, by the kids scaling high rocks and taking turns contorting their bodies magically enough to draw a response from the crowds — whose applause inevitably marred the immense splash of the dives.
I found when I was there that people are either their most relaxed or most rigid in water, and it was easy to tell from a glance which bodies were local and which were not.”
my whole new york, nyc
“I had just finished up three months or so solo travelling through Latin America, and my last stop was, bizarrely, a change of course back to NYC. I’d lived upstate for a while during my university years, and my final few months inhabiting that space was the last chunk of time I had as a child. I lost my dad to cancer soon after I returned back to the UK, and have felt for a long time like that period of American life was a dream. When I returned last year, in 2024, that dream-like quality still permeated the reality of the city. From this, ‘my whole new york’ was born.”
my SISTER’S THINGS, WHITBY
“For the first time in five years, I spent my birthday this year with my family. I’d gotten into the swing of travelling, alone, on the days I turned another number older, but for my most recent do I decided to start letting people in.
I’d grown up with wanting so much to be like my sister. She was the traveller, the adventurer — the only member of my close family who chased after more than our home town. I spent my pre-teens waiting for the emails she would send from internet cafes in Venezuela, Argentina, Chile. In more recent years, I followed her on her birthdays to the seaside towns of Whitby and Whitley Bay, to the very few waterfalls littering Yorkshire, and, ultimately, chased after her to live together in Leeds.
This year, on my birthday, I stole her things and used them as mine — the way sisters are known to do. But instead of clothes and old straighteners, the thing I stole was her knack for finding magic in the near places, too.”
THIS IS WHAT GRIEF LOOKS LIKE, NIAGARA falls
“My dad loved Niagara Falls. It was the last place he wanted to visit — his final resting place. I grew up with tales of barrels and people crazy enough to climb in them, and every year that my parents and I visited our family in Canada, we would try and wade our way to the Falls.
I returned there in 2024, the first time since my dad’s funeral, and the weight of my grief was thunderous. Through the lens of my camera, I picked up images of birds fighting their way through the mist, pummelled into submission by the never-ending waters. I saw old men struggling up the stairs to the viewing deck. I saw the same pain reflected in my mum. All of these things felt like undeniable emblems of grief.
I’d been listening to Bicep’s Glue as I was editing these photos, and I wish I could add the music here, as the whole thing encapsulates what it feels like to be faced with the reality of time: its ceaseless, unending, powerful push — even when we want to stay, just for a moment, right where we are.”