‘That’s just how it is,’ he said.
2004
I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first was The Seventh Wave (2000), photographs of Australia’s beaches, by Parke and his partner – now wife – Narelle Autio. A more intimate and egalitarian collaboration is hard to imagine. Without the list at the end explaining which pictures are by whom it would be impossible to tell them apart. Much of the action takes place in or under the waves. You don’t look at this book. You open it and plunge in. Whoomp! Immediately, you’re immersed, submerged. They’re like pictures of being born, of people exploding into life beneath the sea, or bursting through the surface and into being. It’s as if evolution has been speeded up and compressed so that the origins of life on the planet turn, in a split-second, to the creation of an individual human life. In the same breath it’s mythic and candid – street photography from Atlantis!
The surface of the sea is a film separating two worlds, that of water and that of air. Though absolute, the distinction is perpetually on the brink of dissolving, melting away. People fly through the water as if suspended in a turbulent sky, or float through great clouds of aquatic light. That’s what water is for Parke and Autio – liquid light. Forms dissolve, blur, swim into and out of focus. Quick and silver, the water is a flash-flood of mercury. Part of the attraction of this undertaking, I’m guessing, is that the conventions of perspective and composition are not so much broken as bent out of shape, temporarily suspended. So completely has perspective been absorbed into our understanding of human perception that its abandonment suggests that we might be sharing a non-human or shark’s-eye view. This lurking sense of danger is also a product of association. When a squid is under attack it emits clouds of ink – which is exactly what we get here: huge oil-spills of dense, billowing black, while people dive and bomb through the surface and into the picture frame. They’re like human depth charges, or flash-bulbs exploding. As the shockwaves pass through the pictures it’s as if they’re in the process of being blasted apart – except it’s all pretty puny in comparison with the massive force of water, the rips and moon-tugged tides. Life on earth, in some of these pictures, looks like it could be ending as well as beginning.
The other book, Dream/Life, was actually published a year earlier. As with The Seventh Wave the impact is immediate and jolting. Wow! It’s only as you look at it over time that you sense that there is a degree of dues-paying going on. As with certain jazz albums original work is mixed up with a selection of standards – Parke’s own take on other photographers’ compositions. In The Seventh Wave there is what appears to be a version of Martin Munkácsi’s 1929 photograph of silhouetted boys charging into Lake Tanganyika. This was the picture that had a profound effect on Henri Cartier-Bresson after he travelled to Africa in 1931: ‘that tremendous feeling for plasticity, for life itself, the black, the white, the spray!’ He might have been describing Parke’s picture. Was this a deliberate allusion and homage on Parke’s part? I don’t know. But photographers tend to be deeply aware of what has gone before. A picture of white hats, flowing down a street in Dream/Life, is surely a response to the call of Tina Modotti’s 1926 picture ‘Workers’ Parade’, of sombreros borne along by the tide of history.
The most obvious debt in Dream/Life is to Robert Frank. We don’t want to get bogged down in the anxiety of photographic influence, but it is possible that, as an artist, Parke became fully himself only after he had thoroughly assimilated the lessons of Frank’s vision. One of the animating procedures of modern art in all media is to absorb the work of a master and then take it back to – in this case, turn one’s lens on – one’s native land. This is not copying because the approach, the lens itself, is changed and recalibrated by what it depicts, and confronts.
In Parke’s case the revelation was the transforming power of Australian light. The light is inescapable, tremendous. Technically, the strength of the light meant that some detail could remain illuminated while all else was plunged into a pandemonium of roiling smoke. Darkness visible! The brighter the day the darker it could be made to look.
Dream/Life comes to a premature or arbitrary close in that it signals the impatient ending of a phase, not the completion of a project. It establishes an approach, suggests parameters of style and subject that will characterise – but not limit – Parke’s future output. Later works will continue but intensify the Dream/Life vision so that, at its most extreme, Sydney becomes a kind of ghost city, in the process of being annihilated by light. A passer-by will be transformed into an accidental super-hero: ‘Solar-man’, a bleached absence of pure radiance! (Part of the fascination of this picture is of the photographer-as-magician kind: how did he do that? The difference between magic and photography is that the spell remains unbroken even when the technical explanation – which, in any case, I cannot recall – is forthcoming.) People on a beach will gaze towards the horizon as if at a nuclear test, source of a light so bright that even the sky becomes a vast shadow.
Photography is a generous, abundant medium and Parke is a voracious photographer. Keeping track of what he’s been up to since the publication of these two books can be a little difficult. He is amassing a vast quantity of pictures, working on multiple projects, which are still in the process of being arranged, edited and exhibited. In some of the large format colour photos of billboards and intersections in cities and suburbs it seems as if Jeff Wall has come out of a pub and, confronted by blocks of unyielding colour, become convinced that he has stumbled into an entire world predicated on his idea of artistically heightened reality. I mean, what is that guy doing outside the store with the Championship Bay Trophy sign? Is he the only competitor in the 100-metre street-crawl? Or is he the Australian incarnation of one of those Buddhists who make immense pilgrimages to Tibet, on foot, stopping every few yards to prostrate themselves and offer homage – in this case to the liquid god Castlemaine? It’s also an emblematic image in that it reveals, in densely concentrated form, a quality shared by much of this colour work: the feeling of a larger emptiness that defines and lies beyond the picture frame. It’s as if every Australian city were a franchise of The Truman Show – except it’s not reality that lies beyond the flimsy construct of the city, it’s a nothingness that can never be kept entirely at bay; developers’ plans to expand into this emptiness simply present it with new corners to infiltrate.
If the colour and light in these pictures seems artificially heightened, devoid of subtlety and nuance, that is because they are entirely naturalistic. The light is solid, like walking into a wall. The sky is the opposite of sheltering, as if the long-threatened ozone layer has been completely boiled away. So people stand at street corners, fried by radioactive light so penetrating it’s hard to believe there can be such a thing as interior or inner life. No one looks like they’re ever going to get anywhere. They stand there like survivors of an army of the undead, entombed by the triple glare of heat, light and camera, going nowhere, stuck there not till the end of but in the middle of time.
Then there are the Christmas pictures, provisionally collected under the title Trent Parke’s Family Album. This is like a slasher movie in stills – in which the murder weapon turns out to be an inflatable toy. Or, to put it the other way around, a fun-for-all-the-family comedy in which something sinister – a slaughtered mouse beneath the stairs – always lurks. Looking at these pictures you wonder if ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’ might actually be a murder ballad in disguise.
Parke’s most ambitious project of the last few years has been Minutes to Midnight, exhibited in several museums but not yet published as a book. It is the