Settlement in Australia is centrifugal. Cities cling to the rim of the island-continent. As a result the interior possesses a perpetual and primal allure. An expedition by the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (who disappeared in the Australian desert in 1848) provided the inspiration for Patrick White’s 1957 novel, Voss, about a doomed attempt to cross the continent. ‘Every man has a genius,’ says Voss at one point. ‘Though it is not always discoverable. Least of all when choked by the trivialities of daily existence. But in this disturbing country, so far as I have become acquainted with it already, it is possible more easily to discard the inessential and to attempt the infinite. You will be burnt up most likely … but you will realise that genius.’ Voss, here, is the mouthpiece for White’s sense of his own heroic artistic endeavours – but he might also be commenting on Parke’s photographic odyssey.
A simple comparison brings out the scale and clarity of Parke’s undertaking. When the Goncourt brothers travelled from Paris to sunny Rome for a few weeks in 1867 they quickly became ‘nostalgic for grey’. Of his own trip, Parke has said that no single moment made as deep an impression on him as the protracted experience of not seeing a cloud for three months. ‘It felt’, he said, ‘like we had slid from the face of the earth and ended up in some future world.’ This, then, was a journey not to a heart of darkness but to the heart of light. And whereas Voss fails to cross the continent, or to find any sign of the inland sea mythically imagined to lie at the core of any arid country, Parke offers documentary proof that it exists: in the form of a small water tank in the middle of the outback. Someone is diving into the water as if, in some scorched future, this is all that remains of the untamed seas of The Seventh Wave.
With their starkness and intense expressivity some of the photographs in Minutes to Midnight are reminiscent of work by Michael Ackerman. Like Ackerman, Parke is interested in the emotional or psychological contours of a scene or event. In his recent work Ackerman has pushed further, into the realm of what he terms ‘fiction’. The specifics of where he ends up make no difference. Not nearly so solipsistic, Parke is profoundly attached – in his working life – to one place and one place only: Australia. And whereas, for Ackerman, the intensity and distortion in the pictures is less a response to where he finds himself than a default setting, Parke, in the bush, discovered a place where the technical extremes that his work tends towards were demanded by the subject matter. It is as if, in the outback, there is nowhere for life to hide; it is always and constantly exposed, raw. Storms, when they come, are of an intensity that is devastating, biblical.
In the American west contemporary photographers often tread consciously in the wake of illustrious predecessors such as Timothy O’Sullivan, who accompanied the great surveys that set out to map the country. In Australia the early expeditions were undocumented by photographers. What was discovered, in the absence of the picturesque, the spectacular or distinctive, was a daunting extent of emptiness. As a result, these expeditions were largely invisible affairs. Parke, of course, is by no means the first to make good this lack. But his method is one that shares an unlikely affinity with the kind of experience recorded in the journals of those early explorers. The lack of conventional ‘sights’ or landmarks meant that these journals lacked obvious narrative direction. So, asks the writer Paul Carter in his book Living in a New Country, ‘What is it that gives the discontinuous aggregation of details its narrative direction?’ The answer – but note, first, the concise characterisation of the typical photographic journey à la Frank contained by that question – is that the true subject of these explorer writings is ‘historical space – spatiality as historical experience’. Or, to put it in terms borrowed from the fictional explorer, Voss, infinity as glimpsed at a particular moment in time or history.
At this point it is worth re-emphasising that Parke is a member of Magnum. In some ways the opportunities for photojournalism no longer exist in the way that they did for Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith or Larry Burrows in the various heydays of Life and Time magazines. While it is tempting to lament the decline of photojournalism of the sort traditionally associated with Magnum the recruitment of people like Parke, Martin Parr and Alec Soth has been crucial in preventing it from becoming a kind of heritage agency whose members can be relied on to stamp stories with the photographic equivalent of a heraldic seal. Perhaps the most noticeable recent development in photojournalism – a development coupled with the decline of Life-like magazines and the subsequent increase in opportunities for the presentation and sale of photography as art – is for more intensely and varied subjective responses to events and places. Needless to say, this complicates but does not undermine the documentary imperative to bear witness, to report back on what one saw at a particular time, in a certain place.
The reportage in Minutes to Midnight is of a highly personal and elemental kind: events, people and places as they are chanced upon and as they appear, not in the face of a looming deadline, but in the perma-glare of the outback. Take the well-known picture of Aboriginals hanging out in the street outside the Club Hotel, Wiluna. The hotel sign reads ‘Welcome to Paradise’. Plenty of photographers have exploited the ironic gap between the boasts made by billboards or signs and the way that the surrounding reality falls short of those claims. In this sad place irony seems an alien luxury, an exotic import, and the gap is as vast and arid as a desert. And it’s not just irony that is lacking. The moment caught in this shot of paradise and the wreckage strewn around it is devoid, also, of the kind of split-second urgency that characterises Capa’s famous D-Day photographs. What we get, in this shattered paradise, is the depiction of a state in which what might be expected to be a matter of urgent attention has become a permanent condition of existence, one marked by the complete erosion of any notion of urgency. Like many of Parke’s photographs it is beyond news. It looks as if it could have been taken the day after tomorrow, in the aftermath of history.
2008
Van Gogh’s rise to posthumous glory is unsurpassable but, in scale and strangeness, the story of Miroslav Tichý’s triumph will take some beating. And, unlike Van Gogh, he is around to enjoy it – sort of. Tichý is eighty-two now, and if he could be persuaded to leave his lair in Kyjov, in the Czech Republic, he would see his name writ large on the banners fluttering outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where a retrospective of his work has just opened.
The first things on display are Tichý’s cameras and lenses, looking as rusty and old as weapons unearthed from the battlefields of the First World War. Photographers tend to be obsessed by kit, are always trying out new lenses, films and processes. Tichý began photographing with the most basic Russian-made camera – and this was the technological highpoint of his career. Thereafter he became a scavenger, modifying and building his equipment with whatever came to hand: a rewind mechanism made of elastic from a pair of shorts and attached to empty spools of thread; lenses from old spectacles and Plexiglas, polished with sandpaper, toothpaste and cigarette ash. His telephotos were cobbled together from plastic drain pipes and empty food tins. He also made his own enlarger, out of cardboard and planks. Tichý’s make-do-and-mend philosophy apparently extends to his own, um, wardrobe. Photographs from the early 1990s show him holding his DIY camera, wearing a filthy sweater, stitched together with what look like dead beetles. These portraits of the artist as an old castaway remind one of John McCarthy’s reaction on first seeing long-term hostage Brian Keenan: ‘Fuck me, it’s Ben Gunn!’
So what did Tichý do, once he was kitted out with his homemade arsenal? Put as simply as possible, he spent the 1960s and ’70s perving around Kyjov, photographing women. Ideally he’d catch them topless or in bikinis at the local swimming pool; failing that, he’d settle for a glimpse of a knee or – the limitations