Trent Parke

I have the names of thousands of great photographers that I want to link to rushing through my head like the Generation Game conveyor belt. I can't remember them all.....a toasted sandwich maker.....a his and hers towel set......a cuddly toy......a...oh shit, er.... But perhaps an apt place to start would be Trent Parke, the first Australian to be made a full member of Magnum:- "I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical." You can see his work (obviously then) at Magnum, and on in-public, which includes his recent shift to colour, medium format (market forces or love of experimentation ?). The latter also hosts his wife, Narelle Autio's work- stunning in its own right. Must be nice to be able to go halves on your equipment. Parke's work is spectacularly concerned with light, Australia becomes a dark land brightened by sudden apparitions of otherwordly light. The effects are created in camera with a bit of mild dodging and burning, and nicely Parke isn't prissy about sharing technique in interviews. It is sort of modern pictorialism, and I would imagine, much mimicked. Indeed I am guilty of this intent, but for the fact that I live in Manchester, and even on the single day of the year when it isn't raining the light is of a completely different quality to the intense low sun of a late Sydney afternoon. As Barbara Bolt would have it in her book 'Art beyond Representation', the glare of Australian light can be so bright that it whites out perception.

Rudolph Arnheim

‘If we had wished to begin with the first causes of visual perception, a discussion of light should have proceeded all others, for without light the eyes can observe no shape, no colour, no space or no movement. But light is more than just the physical cause of what we see. Even psychologically it remains one of the most fundamental and powerful of human experiences, an apparition understandably worshiped, celebrated, and importuned in religious ceremonies. To man as to all diurnal animals, it is the prerequisite for most activities. It is the visual counterpart of that other animating power, heat. It interprets to the eyes the life cycle of the hours and the seasons.’ (Rudolph Arnheim)