Parke, Trent

Monument [2023 1ST EDITION & 1ST PRINTING]

Stanley/Barker, 2023. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Stanley/Barker, 2023. Flexibound with embossed leather cover with metal plaque. First Edition, First Printing. 294 pages filled with black & white photographic images throughout with multiple paper weights and gatefolds. BOOK CONDITION: FINE/NEW (sealed in the publisher's original shrinkwrap).

From the publisher: Trent Parke’s landmark publication Monument is a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe over 294 expertly printed pages. The monolithic publication is bound in leather bearing totemic coordinates to the planet Earth, blind stamped end sheets, black sprayed edges, and a loose steel plaque, that once removed, leaves the volume without language. When Trent Parke moved to Sydney from a small Australian country town, his first impression was of the sheer volume of people. He would grab his camera and go out exploring at every opportunity, fascinated by the endless processions. At rush hour, he watched as the city workers moved in a great mass, all walking the great conveyer belt of life. In a trance-like state, treading the same path day after day, week after week, year after year… clocking on, clocking off, all under the spell of the city. Parke would stand on the edge of the wave, on the outside of a new world, looking in. As if watching a newly discovered species. Trent Parke: “At night I would watch the eclipse of moths, millions of them constantly circling the lights of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. At the same time, on my balcony, a miniature performance played out around the light above my head. The moths inevitably and without resistance were drawn to their ultimate demise. Spiralling out of control, like small spaceships caught in a tractor beam. Lured and blinded by the bright white light, they were taken out by hundreds of birds swooping in to snatch them from the air… spiders sat waiting on their webs. Built with precise coordinates across the face of the lights, they captured the hapless tiny creatures that slipped through. If any miraculously managed to survive that onslaught, they continued on, driven towards the flame, intoxicated by those burning hot light globes. Then suddenly an electrical charge in the still air. A small puff of smoke. Gone. Instant disintegration of a life form. Another blip in the universe. Another small spacecraft colliding with the blazing sun.” Magnum Photos: Monument is a book with a narrative in which the earth is approached from space; in which the futility of our existence is laid against the inevitability of our impending demise. It’s a book where images of light battle dark — a dystopian vision that owes as much to the science fiction films Parke watched in his youth as it does to the magical photographic experiments he undertook in Sydney two decades ago. Here, in Australia’s biggest city, Parke worked the streets, moving with the flow of people, increasing his photographic intensity as rush hour approached. He became one with the rhythms of the metropolis, falling in step with the commuters who massed the city’s train stations and bus stops, following the harsh Australian light that would arc down into the crevasses of the city, bouncing off tarmac and windows to light up even the darkest space. Later, after publishing his first photobook, Dream/Life, in 1999, five years after his arrival in Sydney, he took a more experimental turn, pushing the limits of what a camera can do, creating outlandish images where time, scale and perspective are skewed into a vision of Parke’s own creation. At night, he would go home to his flat and watch the moths fly over Sydney Harbour Bridge, “spiraling out of control, like small space-ships caught in a tractor beam.” A few of these images made their way into Minutes to Midnight, Parke’s 2013 photobook, published some eight years after he and his partner, Narelle Autio, returned from their two-year, 90,000-kilometer road trip across Australia. In these pictures the city is simultaneously scalded by the sun and soaked by the rain; the end-times gathering over a country beset by firestorms and drought, in the midst of one its perennial identity crises. But it was the whole country that Parke was looking at in this now acclaimed classic photobook in which humanity seems a guest in the natural environment, where there is a definite feeling that we are living on the surface of a planet. New. Item #4694

Price: $550.00