There’s something about Trent Parke‘s photography that reminds me of David Lynch’s movies, particularly Inland Empire. I think it’s his use of unusual lighting. It gives his photos that sense of normalcy gone terribly, terribly twisted that I see throughout Lynch’s work. Parke’s pictures are wonderfully thought-provoking. I love how he manages to evoke this sense of motion and dreaminess, just through his use of lighting, until the subject becomes almost abstracted.
I’m not going to quote this directly, as I can’t find the source, but I could swear that I saw an interview with Parke where he talked about his inspiration for photographing his work, Minutes to Midnight, coming from a quote about the Australian lack of innocence, and wanting to document the process through which it happened. In order to do this, he took a roadtrip around Australia with his wife (photographer Narelle Autio) for two years, and just took pictures of everything he saw. The results are stunning.
The pictures I’ve put up come from his series “Minutes to Midnight”, “Dream/Life” and “The Seventh Wave”. He started shooting in colour, but I found I preferred the moodiness of his black-and-white photos.
