Minutes to Midnight

In an image-saturated world, it is easy to assume we have seen it all. Yet Trent Parke's photographs have an uncanny power that never quite lets you settle on a simple closed reading.

For more than five years Parke had been saving up to make a long road trip around the world's driest inhabited land. Australia did prove to be a dark place, very different from the way it is perceived in the big cities and portrayed to the world.

Despite the graphic story that unfolds, this is far from an exercise in forensics. Parke has little interest in photography as evidence and a lot in finding human truth through the emotions. His images are synthetic. Not in the sense of artificial or false, but in the deeper meaning of that term that points to the fundamental mechanism of all life: that new and complex things are born of existing simpler ones. And while his form is that of traditional black and white documentary photography, his sensibility is rooted in the kind of tough melancholia found in the music of bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead.

Minutes to Midnight ends with a single image of Parke's new-born son, Jem, arising from the waters of a birthing pool to gasp his first breath. Arched and sleek his tiny body encapsulates the possibility and the uncertainty of human life. It is a fitting conclusion to a journey in which joy is tinged with melancholy, violence grapples with survival and even the deepest sadness glimmers with hope.