Trent Parke is an Australian photographer who was born in 1971, and raised in Newcastle, New South Wales. He first began taking pictures when he was around 12 years old, using only his mother’s Pentax Spotmatic (a 35mm single-lens reflex camera), and the family laundry as his darkroom. Today, he works primarily as a street photographer, and is the only Australian photographer to be represented by Magnum Photos.

He uses hard light to transform urban landscapes into something less familiar. The shadows form large areas of black, which mask unnecessary detail. This causes our eyes to be drawn to the highlights in the image. (Carroll, 2014).

    

(Left: Adelaide. Heinley Street, 2006. Right: Adelaide. Pulteney Street, 2006).

His collection Minutes to Midnight was produced in 2003 with his wife and fellow photographer, Narelle Autio, while they drove almost 56,000 miles around Australia on a two-year road trip. “The work is both a document of a changing nation, uneasy with its identity and its place in the world, and a work of fiction which when combined suggests the build-up, aftermath and rebirth of an apocalyptic world” (Magnum Photos, n.d.). Parke was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for this project.

    

(Above: Minutes to Midnight)

Parke has published two books: the first being Dream/Life in 1999, and the second being The Seventh Wave in collaboration with his wife Narelle Autio in 2000. He was also granted the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2006, and won World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005.