Trent Parke: Magnum photographer putting Adelaide in the frame
He’s the only Australian ever accepted into international art photography agency Magnum, but there’s one photo Trent Parke missed.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It was 1996 and Adelaide’s internationally acclaimed art photographer Trent Parke was in Calcutta covering the cricket World Cup for News Ltd. He had palled up with Steve Waugh, who is keen on photography, and very early one morning they went on an arranged visit to meet Mother Teresa.
They walked up the stairs at her convent and there she was, then well into her eighties and only a year from death, sitting high on what could have been a throne. Shafts of early morning light streamed through a window, illuminating her like a benediction from God. Below, about 60 or 70 nuns sat around like subjects gathered in the service of their queen.
And on the wall there was a sign saying No Photography Inside This House.
“It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen, there was light streaming through, and dust, it was straight out of cinema,” Parke says.
“I had my Leica, the same small camera that I’ve carried for 25 or 30 years, and I just wanted to raise it and take one frame.”
He thought about quickly snapping off one glorious image but this was hallowed ground and he couldn’t find the nerve. “It was one of the best pictures you have seen that just gets better and better with time,” he says.
A bit later Mother Teresa went outside and handed out a simple business card with a prayer on it. Instead of coming back with an iconic image of a saint that would have gone around the world, Parke has her humble prayer framed and in the bookshelves at home.
“It was the only thing I kept from the 1996 World Cup and Australia made the final so it was a very long tour,” he says.
The story comes up because not long ago Waugh rang out of the blue and asked Parke if he wanted to go back with him to India, to act as a photographic mentor while Waugh documented the trip. Parke’s first instinct was to say no because it felt like the last place he wanted to revisit.
“I got quite sick last time and we were covering the cricket in some of the hardest conditions you would ever have to work in,” he says. “Every place we went I picked up some sort of virus or bug. I lost so much weight it took me a year to recover.”
But he said yes. And while helping Waugh, who in India is still treated like a god, he took his own photos which he is sorting into a book. They finished the trip in early 2020 and came off the plane in Singapore and into an international terminal where everyone was wearing masks.
“We had no idea, we hadn’t heard anything about (the pandemic) because we were quite remote and we were travelling around,” he says.
“One of the guys went in to buy a mask and they had run out. It was like something out of a strange dream or a film.”
The enforced lockdown that began in Adelaide a week later sent Parke and his wife, photographer Narelle Autio, into a period of reflection, archiving, curating and contemplation about what to do next.
Parke’s photography is deeply personal and tied up with memory and experience. It sets him apart from other photographers in Australia who aren’t quite the profound and unique storytellers that Parke has become. It lends his work a quality that brought him to the attention of Magnum, the international photographic agency which requires you to jump hurdles for a number of years before its members agree to let you in. Parke is the only Australian photographer to be admitted since the agency was founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson in the late 1940s.
Parke, who is a street photographer himself, says Cartier-Bresson was one of the great French street photographers and one of the greatest photographers of all time. The other founders, including war photographer Robert Capa, are just as esteemed. Part of the mystique of Magnum comes from its origins just after the war when photography was the only true chronicler of life and photographers were like movie stars.
The initiation process was gruelling. Once on a short list, Parke was asked to present 60 photographs to Magnum’s AGM where the members critiqued the work and voted. If you got more than 50 per cent, you stayed in the running and he did. Two years later, he presented 65 works and had to get 65 per cent of the vote, and two years later that was to be repeated for the final time.
“It’s a real roller coaster ride of emotions,” Parke says. “You come in at first with work that might have taken you 10 years to create and within two years you’ve got to have bettered that.”
He and Autio were on a road trip around Australia with their young boys making a series, Minutes to Midnight, when he had to submit his final work to Magnum. He stumbled at the last step and missed out by a single vote but was invited back the following year and received 100 per cent endorsement.
“It was incredibly stressful to make it through but in the end, it was a big moment,” he says. “I was accepted (in 2007) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on the rooftop, and given the Magnum of Champagne to drink from the bottle. It’s always been a bit of a big club.”
It changed his career by putting his work into clearer focus for galleries and collectors but he also benefited from the professional guidance offered by three or four Magnum photographers who championed his work.
“They helped me to hone my vision but at the end of the day you have to find out for yourself what you’ve got to say, what story do you want to tell, why do you take pictures?” he says.
His most epic series, The Black Rose, took seven years and came out of his involvement with Magnum through an informal series about home, which had changed so dramatically for him after moving from a flat in Sydney opposite the Opera House to a quiet rental at West Beach with Autio and their two boys. Parke is from Newcastle but always liked Adelaide where Autio is from, and moved here with the family in 2007.
“All of a sudden there is nothingness, you might see a neighbour but it was silent and I was at home with the kids,” he says. “I started writing these emails (to Magnum photographers) and they started to become bigger and it took me back into all of those places of telling the stories of you as a kid growing up, how you were then.” For Parke, this was exceptionally dark and difficult.
When he was 13, he was at home alone when his mother, Dianne, a keen amateur photographer with her own darkroom, died from asthma in front of his eyes. From that time on, he could not really remember her beyond the memory of the trauma of the night that it happened.
“I didn’t remember Mum at all, nothing, I think it was just ‘wipe everything out’,” he says. “But now it was opening the idea of revisiting Mum’s death and places I never ever wanted to go.”
After her death he had picked up a camera and propelled himself back into busy life, not wanting to go too deep but using it as a kind of magical object through which he could move forward. Now he began using it to slowly face the past, and his journey took him into the tree of his own life and was completed with the discovery of a starkly beautiful Dianne tree in a neighbour’s garden.
“There were all these little linkages and puzzles and that’s how I use photography as well, I use it to solve the questions that I want to ask,” he says. “Most of them are too big but it’s still a way for me to make those discoveries and push photography to a point of discovering things that have never been seen before.”
The resulting exhibition and book feature ghostly and majestic images of birds, wings, a fox, plants and landscapes, all in black and white, and including a cemetery in Adelaide and the black rose itself, a darkly crimson succulent.
To create a photograph, he returns to the same subject time and time again until he is able to find the essence of what he wants to say. One of his most famous images, Moving Bus, part of the Minutes to Midnight series which is in the AGSA collection, captures the giant shadows of figures on one side of the road superimposed over the life-size images of people standing opposite. It was an instant of haunting visual poetry that took a long time to achieve, with Parke shooting on the same spot for three months hoping to catch the moment.
After finishing The Black Rose, which was lauded by critics who also noted the trauma it contained, Parke thought he was done. He was not just emotionally spent but felt he had pushed every option as far as he could. He had documented various categories of Australia, the beach, the suburbs, the bush and the cities. After the photography was finished, Autio took two years to curate it into an exhibition spread over the entire bottom of the AGSA and it felt to Parke like his life’s work.
“I wasn’t sad, it wasn’t depression, it was the opposite,” he says. “I had come to the end of a whole journey of going back into my history and was coming out in a completely new place with a young family.”
He came back to photography through his boys and backyard cricket and a project that began as a small experimental film entered into the Basil Sellers art prize which was shown at the Samstag Museum and grew into a huge Virtual Reality film backed by the Adelaide Film Festival. Called The Summation of Force, Parke and Autio worked with Adelaide’s Closer Productions to turn it into a multichannel artwork based on an otherworldly, almost mythical game of backyard cricket between their boys, Dash and Jem.
They shot for two years to make the film, bribing their sons to be patient and turning their modest backyard into a borderless arena in which to celebrate the intense power and physical grace of the game.
It was hideously expensive. To film a ball smashing a window meant buying three window panes from the wreckers to capture the millisecond of smashed glass. Samstag had a show fall through and asked them to step in and they showed, free, a film that cost them $300,000 to $400,000 to make.
“The arts are crazy; how do we live and work in this crazy world?” he laughs.
Once the AFF Investment Fund stepped in, they went back and rephotographed the backyard, at night under spotlights, then stitched the pieces together into 360 degrees and dropped the images of the boys into what was now a fully immersive experience.
“VR was liberating, it was incredible, it was pure 360 degrees of imagination, above you and below you,” says Parke. “We had drones coming down into the backyard like it was a full stadium, we had glitter, dry ice, and we shot for six weeks creating a universe. Some of that stuff is, I think, the best thing we’ve ever made.”
It opened the 2017 Adelaide Film Festival and was accepted into the New Frontier section of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, which meant a family trip to Utah to meet Robert Redford.
“It was snowing at the time, it was right up in the mountains and we went up to his ski lodge and he gave this talk,” says Parke. “The boys were rubbing shoulders with movie stars and it was all made in our backyard.”
His latest project, Crimson Line, slowly evolved out of that, partly from necessity given they had put their life savings into the film and needed to get back to work. Parke had been driving his kids daily from Semaphore to the city, often in first light which seemed to imbue everything with a dreamland feel. It was the opening he needed.
“Things happen and it will open up a little window and you think ‘what if?’ You have gut feeling and an intuition about something and you continue to do it,” he says. “The act of doing is so important. Sit down and think ‘what am I doing?’ and you get nowhere. For me, you have to get out and start doing.”
Parke never knows at the start where he will end and the Crimson Line book, which was published in London late last year, began as the line of the horizon.
He would head down to the Port before dawn every morning and shoot the first five minutes of light, this time in colour and sometimes with dense factory smoke billowing into the sky. He grew up in a steel city where his father worked at BHP and he was dragged back into images and moments from his youth. Climate change crept in and his images featured as a photo essay in the Griffith Review in February in an issue titled Remaking the Balance which was dedicated to thinking about sustainability and resources.
His work had become about climate change but not really as a topic. “It’s not me taking photographs because I’m an advocate for or against it, it’s because I want to know,” Parke says. “So you start becoming interested and it takes on a whole other level of interest. It’s telling a story, it’s another world.”
Part of that world was also the cochineal beetle, a tiny insect that lives on the surface of the prickly pear cactus which was historically boiled to made the deep scarlet dye that coloured the robes of royalty and members of the church. His photos told the story of the botanist who discovered cochineal, and of the beetles which he discovered living on one of his plants on the veranda.
“It’s telling a story of climate and where we are but it’s not specifically pointed at a place,” he says. “I shot it all around the Port but it has nothing to do with Port Adelaide.”
The first edition sold out in a week and like others of Parke’s books will probably become a collector’s item and a second international edition, with some of the pictures changed, has about 50 copies left. He says prints have become expensive and photographic books are more collectable and he loves building a story into a book.
His 365 project, photographing every day in the early morning, has inevitably been touched by the pandemic because the streets were suddenly empty and life seemed to have stopped. The work he had done with this only started making sense a few weeks ago.
“What I’d been doing for the past two or three years suddenly has a focus, a hard point,” he says.
He won’t say what it is but he sees his job as a photographer as commenting on his lifetime at pivotal times. He is suddenly energised about what living in 2021 means and what he wants to say.
“As soon as that moment happens then everything comes in a rush and you’re hellbent on chasing it down,” he says. “In the last three weeks every morning and afternoon has become so much more purposeful because I know now what has to be done.”
More Coverage
‘We hope it ends soon’: Power couple on brutal private battle
Ben Cutting and Erin Holland are facing a battle they admit is “emotionally, physically and financially taxing”.
This is the most selfish thing drivers do – I blame you all
People can leave their brains behind while driving – and this annoying habit proves it.