Bugger Rupert. Here you go -
AS he tells it, Trent Parke’s childhood came to an end, with devastating abruptness, on a late winter’s night at his family’s weatherboard home in Newcastle in August 1984. He was 13, and the sole witness to his mother Dianne’s death from an asthma attack. His father was out playing squash; his siblings were asleep, “so I ran up the road to get the doctor who lived two houses up, but by the time we got back, she was lying on the hallway floor”, he says. “I was led away by the neighbours and that was it. I refused to go to the funeral, I was too distraught. And from that point, I kind of just blocked out everything from my childhood. ”
Parke, 43 — father of two, cricket tragic, amnesiac, mystic, Magnum photographer — tells this story in curiously flat, staccato bursts in a small studio in suburban Exeter, north of Adelaide. A live radio broadcast of the first day in the Test match between Australia and India crackles quietly in the background; outside, the sleepy, sun-bleached main street, edged by hydroponic stores, home-brew suppliers and milk bars, seems too wide for the sporadic traffic.
Parke is a tall, lean man with a slightly ragged exterior; lopsided sunnies poke out of a shaggy surfer’s mane, one knee protrudes from faded jeans, his feet are dusty and bare: he and photographer wife Narelle Autio broke toes and injured their feet on the same day recently, courtesy of their habitual shoeless states. Despite his exhaustion (“I am mentally hollowed out”), Parke bounces like a rubber ball around a small room dominated by giant silver gelatin prints, nimble, work-gnarled fingers pointing out fine details — a bird’s skeletal wing, scudding clouds, veins and scales and feathers — as his eyes dance restlessly, critically, from print to print.
All around him are the bones of his new show: scale models, artists’ books, prints in various states of preparation, uniformly beautiful, deceptive, hooking the eye with their extravagant strangeness. Like Parke, whose charm hides melancholic depths (“behind that laconic veneer, there’s a really personal intensity that [comes] from someone whose had really difficult times along the way,” observes Art Gallery of South Australia curator Julie Robinson), nothing is as it seems. A glowing cosmic panorama reveals itself to be a splayed rat fossil; a stunning abstract swirl morphs into a giant butterfly being devoured by ants, a mural of a forest filled with birds, cicadas and bats turns out to be the magnified inside of a silver whiting, a spindly, elaborate cathedral of bones is a bird’s wing in close up. They frame his head in a halo: a triptych of coiled snakes, supernovas formed of squashed insects, bones, roots, obelisks, cancerous growths. Angels and wraiths peep from clouds, a field of cows at night is hinted at only by a line of ghostly red eyes.
Collectively, they represent the fruits of an epic journey Parke began in a coastal Adelaide suburb in 2007, and which would end up yielding more than 3000 photographs, 15,000 words of text, 14 books, and various videos, installations and short films harvested from images taken around the South Australian capital and on road trips across the country over a period of seven years. In March at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Parke, the only Australian full member of the prestigious international Magnum Photos agency, will launch The Black Rose, an intensely personal exhibition born of childhood grief and one he views as the most significant of his career. The exhibition, which will occupy the entire bottom floor of the gallery, will be the largest single exhibition of the artist’s work, featuring everything from 120cm x 150cm silver gelatin prints to a site-specific installation at the entrance of the stairs (the “forest” with birds and bats) at around 26m by 4m.The director of AGSA, Nick Mitzevich, says the institution is honoured to “be the first gallery to present The Black Rose, one of our most ambitious contemporary art projects to date, and presented on a scale seldom seen”.
In her exhibition essay, co-curator Maria Zagala quotes Susan Sontag’s view that “people robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent pictures, at home and abroad”: in this show, all the big themes of existence — life and death, birth and loss, chance and coincidence — are played out in a wealth of rich, strange imagery. “I’ve given it my all,” he says reflectively. “This is the sum of everything I have tried to do as a photographer. Everything has gone into this. Everything. I will never do anything like this again.”
Mitzevich says “by stripping himself bare to reveal his own imperfections, Parke pursues the bigger meaning of life and in doing so he challenges us to reflect on our own lives”. Julie Robinson, the gallery’s senior curator of prints, drawings and photographs, says it’s a landmark event “in terms of Australian contemporary photography. I can’t think of anyone else who has worked on such an ambitious project, one of such complexity and such personal relevance, and yet which speaks of ideas that affect us all. When he came to us three or four years ago, we didn’t really know how big it was going to be, but we went with him because it was quite clear this was quite amazing and needed to be supported.”
For Parke, The Black Rose represents his best work, forming a stunning visual autobiography akin to “a film told in photographs”. Born in Newcastle in 1971, his interest in photography was seeded early. He has hazy memories of watching his mother, Dianne, a keen amateur photographer, in her makeshift darkroom in the laundry at home: “three trays, a small, old plastic enlarger. It was her camera that I picked up and started using after her death.” A key early photograph taken with her Pentax Spotmatic — a trail of his wet footprints — made him realise the therapeutic power of photography to permanently fix a moment in time: powerful magic for a boy navigating devastating loss. He earned pocket money photographing school formals and selling cameras at the local Kodak store on Thursday evenings. “Photography became a career path without me even really trying.”
Parke began his professional life in country newspapers before moving at 21 to Sydney to work on The Daily Telegraph and The Australian, throwing in his dream to become a professional cricketer (he was a talented leg-spinner) along the way. A flair for sports photography saw him travel internationally with the Australian team for five years. In 1999, Parke left to pursue artistic ambitions: over the next 15 years, he built a formidable critical reputation on the back of shows such as Dream/Life & Beyond, Coming Soon, and The Christmas Tree Bucket, examining everything from urban street life and advertising culture to suburban holiday rituals. His grittily dark, brooding series Minutes to Midnight, which rose from an epic, almost 90,000km road trip around Australia with Autio in 2003-04, earned him a new wave of critical praise saluting his mastery of light and shadow, and powerful, raw documentary approach. Photographer and critic Robert McFarlane has said that Parke “has one of the most vivid visual signatures in Australian photojournalism. His photographs do not observe life so much as contain its contradictions within dense, idiosyncratic tableaux.”
In 2007, he was the first Australian to be made a full member of Magnum Photos (Parke, who has said “it is a gruelling and emotional rollercoaster trying to prove yourself worthy”, was doused, appropriately, with champagne from a magnum at a ceremony at the Museum of Modern Art, New York). It was a personal and professional triumph to be truly savoured, given the arduous five-year vetting process he went through (prospective members have to be invited to apply).
Set up as a photographic co-operative in 1947 and dedicated to photojournalism and documentary photography, Magnum is widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious photographic agency. A founding member, Henri Cartier-Bresson, described it as a “community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually”. Parke first came to Magnum’s attention in 2002 and was invited to submit a portfolio of photographs. He became a nominee the same year in what was the first stage of a three-part process, and in 2005 was accepted as an associate before attaining full membership status in 2007. He is typically humble about his elevation: many of his Magnum colleagues, who include the likes of Alec Soth, Jim Goldberg and Donovan Wylie, and whom he meets every June at Magnum’s annual general meetings (held alternatively in New York, London and Paris) “have become great lifelong friends, and it’s kind of like this big family”.
PARKE hops excitedly around a model of how the exhibition will be laid out in the basement exhibition space at the Art Gallery of South Australia — imagine a subterranean warren of spaces beginning with the “universe room” followed by the birth, childhood and other themed rooms charting various stages of life. The seeds for The Black Rose were sown when he and Autio, who have two young sons Jem and Dash, moved from Sydney to the sleepy coastal suburb of Largs Bay in Adelaide in 2007. The sudden silence, he says, gave him time to think, stilled a lifetime habit of restlessness and sparked a desire to fill huge missing chunks of childhood memories caused by the trauma of his mother’s death. “I’ve always been running, not looking back,” he says.
From the start, the project was steeped in strange portents. On a road trip through Victoria, he spotted a velvety, bizarre, “almost mythical, spiralling” black succulent in a pot in a motel, and was told by a stranger nearby that the plant was called the black rose. He took a cutting home, and later, researching the meaning, found that “symbolically the black rose suggests death, or the completion of a long journey, and it also represents the search for absolute perfection, as the black rose does not truly exist”.
In 2009, the embryonic project — at that point just nine peculiarly resonant photographs he had harvested from scores of images randomly taken over a three-week period — started taking real shape after Parke began a project where he would email long, intimate accounts of his daily life to his Magnum colleagues (he would also later send them daily Jpegs of the sunset for a year in what would become the 365 Sunsets, Adelaide series). It unlocked a hitherto unrealised talent for writing: a natural storyteller who prefers creating sequences rather than single photographs, his often beautifully poetic, stream-of-consciousness diary entries will see public light as part of 14 artists’ books to be released by German publisher Gerhard Steidl.
This charting of “interconnected ideas and chances and coincidences and events” also revealed a strange pattern. “All of a sudden it seemed to be making a story and seeming to point to a path of sorts, back to my mother’s death.”
Shooting more than 1000 rolls of film a year, Parke, looking for clues and connections in the natural world, obsessively charted his daily life in Adelaide and in road trips through South Australia, the Northern Territory and back to his childhood home in Newcastle, NSW. It was no easy feat: he recounts perennial money troubles, smashing his camera on rocks, shooting for extended lengths of time in the outback without “being able to develop a single picture ... that was scary”. Autio gave up her work as a freelance photographer for a year to collaborate with him: “It’s been a very big commitment from her, from everyone. It’s been an incredible journey in terms of the emotional side of things. And also financially it’s been tough — we were almost, at a point, thinking: how are we going to get through this?”
CRITICS have said Parke’s eye for capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary recalls the notion of “the decisive moment”, which Cartier-Bresson described as “a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.” The photographs Parke harvested from these years reflect this curiously instinctive ability to see things others don’t. A singular vision is at work in images ranging from Catfish and Turtles, Roper River, Northern Territory, 2011, where floating forms glow like phosphorescence in the water, to the ghostly, granulated human faces from his The Camera is God 2014 series, taken on an Adelaide street corner; to the rock seemingly morphing into a triangle of pure light in Pirate ship, St Kilda, South Australia, 2007.
The Black Rose, he says, brought out the best in him as a photographer and artist, recharging jaded creative batteries by allowing him to push technical boundaries with techniques like extreme magnification (“The reason I take pictures is to make discoveries … you get this high, it’s almost like a drug”), harness vital skills learned in street and sports photography (the latter is all about instinct, he says: “photography is about anticipation; the camera is just a black box with a button, it’s all about being ahead of time, not just pushing the button”), make his first short film (he’s a big David Lynch fan), and experiment with everything from colour to large-format to 35mm film. One of the most satisfying aesthetic challenges lay in blowing up his large silver gelatin photographs into giant prints of stark clarity — all rich, velvety blacks and high contrast courtesy of a special machine developed with his long-time printer in Sydney, Sandra Barnard.
“You get life and death, dark and light, that’s very important in my work,” he says.
The projectalso allowed Parke to indulge his fascination with shooting on film; he remains enthralled by the “magic” of chemicals reacting with film and rues the general decline in traditional darkroom skills in a digital age.
“There are a hell of a lot of terrible prints around. Those basic skills you had to learn — not just sticking something on a computer and just fixing it up with PhotoShop — those are definitely something that has been lost, and it is a shame. My kids come into a darkroom and they see an image slowly and magically come up and it’s ‘wow’ — it’s what hooked me, too. And so many people haven’t seen that.”
Has the mass saturation of imagery sparked by the rise of the smartphone cheapened photography? “Probably there is not the same impact there was before,” he concedes, although on the bright side, he believes it’s sparked a rise in public interest in photography: “Everyone is a photographer now, great.”
To Parke, however, photography is about instinct and personal stories and ideas: he snorts out a “complete rubbish” through thin lips when told of The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones’s provocative view that photography “is not an art”. Jones was commenting on the recent reported sale of a single photograph by Australian-born photographer Peter Lik for $6.5 million to an unnamed US buyer.
One of the more curious aspects of The Black Rose is how unashamedly it is wrapped in the language and imagery of mysticism. Talking to Parke, one is struck by the many unexpected incarnations contained in that lean frame: the diviner and seer behind the prosaic, larrikin Newcastle boy, the emotional, intense figure lurking within the former sports photographer, the man who sees portents in dirt swirls, tarot cards, his dreams, a stranger’s knock on the door, in the clicking of cicadas (“It’s the symbol of life, it’s also like the clicking of my finger on the camera button”) in his vivid, almost hallucinatory nocturnal visions.
“My brain almost exploded during this time (on the project), I would wake at 3am and write down my dreams, everything had meaning,” he says. He recounts a dream where his son queried him about a monstrous growth on his back: he was so unnerved when he woke up that he went to a skin specialist who diagnosed a melanoma on his face, growing unnoticed for years and requiring immediate surgery.
As he photographed details of the natural world and everyday life, they took on, he says, a greater significance and meaning, eventually knitting together to form a larger, complex story which helped him “find” his mother in physical symbols in the natural world (he’s long been haunted by the way his mother was seemingly erased, like chalk: “Mum had no grave, her ashes were thrown to the wind”).
Eyes glowing, he shows me curious recurrences in shapes and motifs between random objects: the shape of an ellipse, say, echoed in the image of a bird spearing a cloud, the scar on his face, a broken mirror. Breathlessly, he poses this question: is this mere coincidence, or something more mysterious at work? To Parke, there is only one answer. The Black Rose, he says, has revealed to him a strange web of connectivity in the natural world: to him, it speaks of a kind of comforting order in the universe, some higher hand at work, not just the presence of the kind of harsh random forces that took his mother away.
In her exhibition essay, co-curator Maria Zagala says there’s a fairytale quality to Parke’s epic project: “Similar to fairytales it has at its centre a hero on a quest that leads ultimately to a transformation.”
How has he been altered? He is reflective: there was pain along the way, he says, as he examined the veracity of old beliefs — but also a great emotional payoff. He’s found some peace, finally, with the fact of death (“where there is light there is shadow, negative and positive”), and draws comfort from finally having found a place to grieve — an obelisk on a hill in Newcastle which his mother loved and where he plans to plant a cutting of the black rose this year.
“It has been like a storybook that was already written. Everything was already there, and it was just going out and finding the answers to it.”
Fellow Magnum photographer Wylie once said that the year a person becomes a full member of Magnum is the year they will do their best work, and 2007, Parke’s date of acceptance, marked the starting point of The Black Rose.
The photographer shakes his head wearily: who knows? But then there’s a sudden smile. “I had no thought of trying to do anything [this big] when I started it seven years ago. It was going to be just a few pictures, probably of my Adelaide surroundings.”
He regards the supernovas and angels, birthing mothers and black swans around him: the radio continues crackling softly in the background.
“I didn’t know it was going to be the cosmos, the galaxy, birth, life, death, time, life cycles, everything,” he says. “Life’s funny.”
The Black Rose opens at the Art Gallery of South Australia on March 14
