In the Indian popular imagination, Australia exists as a space full of adventurous delights whether it is via Hollywood celebrities like Russell Crowe or architectural triumphs like the Sydney Opera House or the exotic geographic landscapes routinely exploited by Bollywood. This is certainly one reason why Indian students? demand for an education Down Under is reaching record peaks, enrollments having gone up by 51% this year. But an exhibition of Trent Parke?s photos that opened in the capital this week works hard against the established stereotype.
Titled ?Minutes to Midnight?, the exhibition is on at the AIFACS Gallery from 12-27 July. It is part of Chobi Mela IV, an international photography festival that is coming here via Dhaka and Kolkata. Composed of photos that show the subject country in a grimmer than usual aspect, it was inaugurated here by its High Commissioner John McCarthy. He noted that while ?these are not images that you put into travel brochures, ? they are recognisably Australian to anyone who has spent time in the country.?
In explaining what moves him to seek out the jagged and desolate aspects of his country, Parke has cited a survey that found 60% of Australians feeling that their relaxed lifestyle had become a thing of the past: ?I don?t know what it was like in other countries, but in Australia there was this sense that it?s only a matter of time? before terrorism got to it like it had America on September 11. To track all that was therefore changing across his country, this intrepid photographer packed up his family in a caravan and set out on a journey that would take two years and see him traverse 90,000 km.
Parke is the only Australian photographer to have become a full member of the famous Magnum photo agency. And in a podcast available at this agency?s site, he explains: ?This body of works is about the emotion of the time that we live in?like fragments of dreams and nightmares.? How do these fragments counteract established stereotypes?
To take one example, when shooting the World Rally Championships, Parke shuns glamourised ?hot wheels? images to focus on a trail of dust that they leave behind, creating an arc whose beauty is of a darker sort, rather surreal actually. Similiarly, whether it is in capturing a plague of flying foxes across the outback or a kangaroo foetus aborted in a roadkill, he gives the much-lauded Australian wildlife a non-standard take.
Even the Sydney Opera House is represented only with sinister overtones, for instance by way of showing what it looks like on a stormy day, shadowed by clouds and appearing as if it were straight out of dystopic science fiction ? la Ridley Scott?s Bladerunner. In fact Parke has a gift for presenting the most festive of jamborees as dismal scenes. Some artistic magic, or more mundanely a skillful command over the secrets of shadows and light, turns New Year revellers into wretched creatures bathed in what could be acid rain (see first picture on the left). And his portrayal of the Australian outback is no less idealised, accentuating as it does what one reviewer has called the reality of ?harsh lives and hard survivals.? As Parke has said in the Magnum podcast, ?Minutes to Midnight? is apocalyptic.?
His choice of black and white is driven by Parke?s sense that this is the best medium for conveying the weightier emotions, for convincing viewers to pursue a personal connection with the images flashing in front of them. And this choice is much appreciated by those seeing his exhibition.