Trent Parke

In 2003, Trent Parke began a road trip around his native Australia, a monumental journey that was to last two years and cover a distance of over 90.000 km. Minutes to Midnight is the ambitious photographic record of that adventure, in which Parke presents a proud but uneasy nation struggling to craft its identity from different cultures and traditions. Minutes to Midnight merges traditional documentary techniques and imagination to create a dark visual narrative portraying Australia with a mix of nostalgia, romanticism and brooding realism. This is not a record of the physical landscape but of an emotional one. It is a story of human anxiety and intensity which, although told from Australia, represents a universal human condition in the world today.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…. The Christmas Tree Bucket is a modern-day Christmas story with a dark edge. A wordless narrative, Parke's story is an ironic take on the typical Australian suburban Christmas. He photographs friends and family, and casts them in a twisted tale that merges fact and fiction. The viewer is left to make imaginative sense of images of barbeques, screaming children, a burning gingerbread house and even the photographer himself vomiting into the infamous Christmas Tree Bucket. Says Parke: "It was there--while staring into that bright red bucket, vomiting every hour on the hour for fifteen hours straight--that I started to think how strange families, suburbia, life, vomit and in particular, Christmas really was … Merry Christmas!"