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 record of a two-year, 60,000-mile road trip around Australia that Parke and Autio began in 2003. (Once again a precedent set by Frank – the mid-1950s trip that led to The Americans – springs to mind.) The result is what Parke calls ‘a psychological portrait’ of Australia in the midst of the worst drought in the country’s history – and of the fires that resulted from that drought – and, less tangibly, of the sense of threat that came in the wake of the Bali bombings in which many Australians lost their lives.
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,
