trent parke

Australian Passion

“I love taking pictures,” says Trent Parke, “and I love Australia. It’s the only place I want to photograph.” Parke’s dual passions have resulted in a body of work that portrays Australia in a revelatory light, a light that is as revealing of Parke’s own psyche as it is of Australia itself.

“My mum died when I was 10 and it changed everything about me,” says Parke. “It made me question everything around me.” Soon after his mother’s death, Parke began taking photographs with an old Pentax, and his questioning became visual. “Photography is a discovery of life which makes you look at things you’ve never looked at before. It’s about discovering yourself and your place in the world.”

Parke’s discovery of the world around him include The Seventh Wave ( shot by Parke and his partner, Narelle Autio), a portrayal of the insignificance of man set against the raw power of Australia’s seas. The theme of isolation and alienation is developed in his black and white exploration of Sydney, Dream/Life, a work where Parke combined extreme lighting and long exposures to create a street photography that reveals the fragile facades of any urban existence.

With Dream/Life under his belt, Parke was looking for inspiration to re-examine the state of the Australian nation. He found it when he saw an article saying that Australia had lost its innocence, that the Bali bombings, environmental disaster and a beleaguered indigenous population had made the Lucky Country not so lucky any more. This supposed loss of Australian innocence, Parke decided, would be the subject of his next project.

“I went on a giant road trip where me and Narelle travelled around for 2 years living in a 2-man tent. I’d shoot my film on the road and because I wanted to stay in that sense of being on a road trip, I’d process it on the road, hanging the negatives up to dry on a clothesline. I had a laptop, so every time we got to a caravan park I could scan the pictures in, print up little postcards and see what was happening.”

With the pictures shot, Parke made the exhibition (now showing in Australia) and is currently editing the book version. “The book is almost a fiction where I’m creating a story from these documentary pictures. It’s basically making a statement that the world’s going crazy,” says Parke. In three parts, Minutes to Midnight puts Australia on a visual journey where the nation approaches the apocalypse, meets the apocalypse and finally finds redemption and rebirth.


It is a raw work that combines the energy of street photography with Parke’s penchant for weird lighting. In one street shot from Sydney, a line of people stand across the road, small figures lit by late sunlight. They are surrounded by a strip of white light against which giant shadows rise. It’s a haunting image that is simply baffling until Parke reveals it was a three second exposure. “It is a bus going through an intersection and this is the shadow of people on this side of the intersection on the bus. But for me, it reminds me of Hiroshima where people’s shadows were burnt onto the wall.”

Next comes the post-apocalyptic aftermath. Plagues of flying foxes flit across the sky, the road kill body of a kangaroo foetus lies on the tarmac and a barren landscape of scorched tree stumps from a firestorm in Canberra are just a few of the images that spell doom Australian style. It’s a signifier of how, beyond the beach and barbie facade of the Australian Dream, a harsh and unforgiving environment beckons, a world where death and despair are, and always have been, part of the landscape.

For a reborn Australia, Parke shows a New Year Bachelor and Spinster Ball in the depths of the Outback. As New Year approaches, a water truck sprays the revellers with water to keep them cool. Another image shows flying foxes tracing a sperm-like pattern in the sky, while Parke’s images of his heavily pregnant partner coiled up like a foetus in a billabong adds an autobiographical touch to the story, as does the beautiful image of his son being born.

With Minutes To Midnight done, if not quite dusted, Parke was looking for a new challenge. “The Minutes to Midnight pictures were lyrical and timeless, but there was nothing that really identifies Australia in a physical sense, so I wanted to do something that looked at urban Australia, that used signs and advertisement that would date the country in a particular time. I wanted more detail so people can read signs. That was why I had to go up from 35 mm to medium format. At the same time, I started going through our family albums and I found all these old kodachromes and I was amazed by the colour. That was the main catalyst for going into colour.”

So Parke went from shooting black and white on a Leica to medium format colour on a Mamiya 7. As the project began, Parke’s street-shooting style became more considered. “I wanted to have this quietness, this stillness to the images. I’d have five spots in my day where I shoot from and I know that at say, 7 o’clock in the morning the light will be in a certain place and I can shoot there for ten minutes, then I move back to another spot where the light will be in a different place and I’ll shoot there. With this work, I’ll go back to a place again and again and again until something happens. I shoot a lot of pictures, up to 40 rolls a day. It costs me a fortune in film.”

One Sydney image shows a boy staring straight at the camera as he is held by his brother. Behind him his diminutive mother talks on a mobile, pram in hand, while to one side a tall man in a blue shirt talks to a woman in pink. All are bathed in a reflected light, but around them pools of black lap over other passers-by, granting them the kind of anonymity we associate with the city.

Parke’s hunger for seeing and photographing in new ways have made him Australia’s most visionary photographer, a man who has made the documentation of Australia his life’s work. Despite the creative energy, enthusiasm and passion, he remains down-to-earth, his philosophy as deceptively simple as his pictures are complex. “You shoot a lot of shit and you’re bound to come up with a few good ones.”