Stills Gallery Presents Trent Parke @ Paris Photo

Press Release

For Paris Photo 2014 Stills Gallery will present a solo exhibition by Adelaide-based Magnum photographer Trent Parke including key works from his latest series The Camera is God (street portrait series), which premiered in 2014 in Dark Heart, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.

On the cusp between portraiture and abstraction, this work represents an exciting departure in Parke’s oeuvre. Expanding our expectations of both portraiture and street photography, the anonymous images of people on street corners hum with a sense of the human spirit. The subjects emerge from the film’s grain, as if distilled to their very essence. From a distance these street portraits appear to be recognizable, only to evaporate into abstraction on closer viewing.

Trent Parke’s four individually titled photo books To the Sea, which comprised the winning works of the Prudential Eye Award for Photography 2014, will also be exhibited at Paris Photo. Whilst he works within the language of documentary photography, Parke sees himself as a storyteller. Bringing narrative, mystery and illusion to the recorded moment, the books journey away from city streets into empty landscapes and small towns, interweaving images into dark and mysterious streams of consciousness.

Finally, Stills will be premiering (exclusively at Paris Photo) 3 works from Parke’s current project The Black Rose a major solo exhibition that will take place at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2015. These 3 bodies of work show the breadth of his creative and technical abilities and of his imagination.

From his earliest foray into the medium, Parke has prowled the streets equipped with his camera. He has found there, amongst the people, the buildings, the patterns of light and darkness, not only a complex and shifting picture of contemporary life, but also an expression of the inner journeys he has taken. Over the course of this practice, he has presented us with a uniquely Australian perspective on life, but also on the medium; a perspective that is respectful of the past but probes possibilities for the future.

Trent Parke is one of Australia’s most celebrated photographic artists, and is the only Australian photographer in Magnum Photo Agency. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his artwork, including in January 2014 the inaugural Prudential Eye Award for Photography in Singapore, and previously Gold Lenses from the International Olympic Committee, World Press Photo Awards, and the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his series Minutes to Midnight. In 2013, Steidl released two hardback publications of Parke’s work, Minutes to Midnight and The Christmas Tree Bucket.

Stills Gallery is one of Australia’s longest running commercial galleries and one of the few specializing in contemporary photography. The gallery supports both emerging and established artists working across the spectrum of photomedia.