Trent Parke

In 2003, Trent Parke began a road trip around his native Australia, a monumental journey that was to last two years and cover a distance of over 90.000 km. Minutes to Midnight is the ambitious photographic record of that adventure, in which Parke presents a proud but uneasy nation struggling to craft its identity from different cultures and traditions. Minutes to Midnight merges traditional documentary techniques and imagination to create a dark visual narrative portraying Australia with a mix of nostalgia, romanticism and brooding realism. This is not a record of the physical landscape but of an emotional one. It is a story of human anxiety and intensity which, although told from Australia, represents a universal human condition in the world today.

Minutes to Midnight

A stream of consciousness journey by the photographer in photographs and verse. A storybook for adults.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of TRENT PARKE?S only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks. 00Throughout his career PARKE has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colours of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the colour crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring. 00Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the coloured dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colours of birth and blood Parke also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons.

Crimson Line

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse The Christmas Tree Bucket is a modern-day Christmas story with a dark edge. A wordless narrative, Parkes story is an ironic take on the typical Australian suburban Christmas. He photographs friends and family, and casts them in a twisted tale that merges fact and fiction. The viewer is left to make imaginative sense of images of barbeques, screaming children, a burning gingerbread house, and even the photographer himself vomiting into the infamous Christmas Tree Bucket. Says Parke: It was therewhile staring into that bright red bucket, vomiting every hour on the hour for fifteen hours straightthat I started to think how strange families, suburbia, life, vomit and in particular, Christmas really was Merry Christmas! Trent Parke, born in Newcastle, Australia, in 1971, joined Magnum Photos in 2002 and has been a full member since 2007. Parke has exhibited internationally and has received numerous awards including World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, and the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography in 2003. His publications include Dream / Life (1999), The Seventh Wave with Narelle Autio (2000), Bedknobs & Broomsticks (2010), and the highly anticipated Minutes to Midnight, also to be published this season by Steidl.

Trent Parke's Family Album

The Christmas Tree Bucket

Kristen Lubben

Magnum Photos

Collector's Edition: packaged in a presentation case with a numbered contact sheet featuring Trent Parke's The Seventh Wave, 2000. Each contact sheet is embossed with 'Magnum Photo Collections' on the white border, and hand-stamped with the photographer's copyright on the verso. Produced to the exacting demands of Magnum's own print room and with the approval of the individual photographers or estates involved, these contact sheets provide an exceptional insight into the creation of truly great photographs. This special and important photography book presents, for the first time, the very best contact sheets created by Magnum photographers. Contact sheets tell the truth behind a photograph. They unveil its process, and provide its back story. Was it the outcome of what a photographer had in mind from the outset? Did it emerge from a diligently worked sequence, or was the right shot down to pure serendipity a matter of being in the right place at the right time? This landmark publication provides the reader with a depth of understanding and a critical analysis of the story behind a photograph, the process of editing it, and the places and ways in which the selected photographs were used. For anyone with a deep appreciation of photography and a desire to understand what goes into creating iconic work, Magnum Contact Sheets will be regarded as the definitive volume. With 435 illustrations in total, 230 in colour, including over 3,600 frames on 139 contact sheets.

Trent Parke

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