Trent Parke began photographing at 12. At 13, after witnessing his mother’s death, he photographed his wet footprints in her darkroom — “From that moment, the camera never left my side.” In 1999, Elliott Erwitt discovered Dream/Life and invited him to pursue Magnum. After three years of reviews, Parke became its first Australian member, saying, “Everything driving my work stems from that one moment.”

Monument is one of Parke’s most striking works—its black exterior, braille title, and pages printed in deep black suggest something cosmic. Referencing the Voyager Golden Record and evoking Kubrick’s 2001, it feels both like a time capsule and a distress signal. "This is my record,” Parke says. “My monument of humankind.”

The book spans 25 years of work, full of star-like specks, grainy portraits, urban congestion, and a silhouetted figure—Parke’s “falling star,” drifting through eternal darkness. These motifs reflect his view of humanity from a distance, like an alien visitor. “It’s as if I’m looking at humans from space,” he explains.

To sequence the book, Parke relied on Max Richter’s Hostiles soundtrack, using it like a film score. “I wanted something that started simple and melancholy, then spiraled out of control,” he said. “The human race as a blip in the life of the universe.”

The Camera is God, a project excerpted in Monument, was shot daily at the same Adelaide crosswalk using a tripod and shutter release to mimic CCTV. “I didn’t try to control who my camera captured,” Parke said. He later cropped tightly into faces, enlarging the grainy 35mm frames into near-anonymous portraits. “It was like seeing people at the level of particles.” For Parke, the series reflects the fragility of life - “We are here one minute, gone the next. A fleeting moment on a street corner says it all.”

Parke’s The Seventh Wave, made with his wife Narelle starting in 1999, explores our relationship with the ocean through underwater photography. “The ocean is a symbol for the ultimate universal energy,” Narelle said, “both tranquil and violent.” Wanting to stay immersed—literally—they shot everything with at least one foot in the water using a 35mm Nikonos camera.

They worked tirelessly over two years, documenting beaches across Australia with no framing, only instinct, often tossing the camera forward and hoping for the best. “It was the ultimate candid photography,” Parke said. A breakthrough came when Parke accidentally loaded the camera batteries backwards. The resulting ultra-fast shutter speed and push-processed film gave them exactly the look they’d been chasing: sharp, chaotic, grainy images with what they called a “mercurial quality—like liquid silver.” From that moment on, they shot the entire series that way, capturing the fleeting, untamed energy between people and the sea.

Minutes to Midnight is Parke’s haunting portrait of a world on edge, shaped by a 90,000 km road trip across Australia. Inspired by a newspaper article claiming the country had “lost its innocence,” Parke set out to capture the underlying tension he felt everywhere—reflected in global anxieties like terrorism, racism, and natural disaster.

Influenced by the dark, dreamy tone of music videos by Sigur Rós and Radiohead, he envisioned the work as a fragmented, cinematic sequence—“almost as a film clip.” The result feels like a fractured dream of modern life. But Parke insists meaning is subjective: “It’s important that people react to the images from their own perspective... because of what they’ve experienced in their lifetime.'