Minutes to Midnight

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.
Trent Parke, born in Newcastle Australia in 1971, joined Magnum Photos in 2002 and has been a full member since
2007. Parke has exhibited internationally and has received numerous awards including World Press Photo Awards in
1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, and the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography in 2003. His publications
include Dream / Life (1999), The Seventh Wave with Narelle Autio (2000), Bedknobs & Broomsticks (2010), and the
long-awaited Christmas Tree Bucket, also to be published this season by Steidl.