Monument by Trent Parke sold out within 7 hours of its announcement.
The publishers, Stanley Barker, are right when they say Monument is:
“… a portal through which we bear witness to the disintegration of the universe.”
This is why.
The book starts quietly with the coordinates of planet earth etched onto black paper.
Photos of stars morph into white lit moths drawn to the light that will kill them.
The moths merge into multiple white lights of queuing cars silhouetted against darkness.
Lighting strikes and we see feet on damp pavements, people waiting to cross roads, queues lit like stars of the stage at bus stops, or conveyed into the bowels of the subway. A procession of commuters in a trance-like trudge to the thing that fills their day.
Swirls of people dissolving into the ether. A different dimension of time. Ghostly figures mist past while still figures look passively on.
We are all standing next to ghosts.
There is no respite.
Deep, deep, dark blacks and blinding bright white light. Eyes stare at you before you see them, blurred birds land, ghosts grimace, children lose balance, hair becomes a crown of thorns. People lost in reflection, a dramatic exchange which may be romantic or threatening, a figure looms over it all in the foreground while wisps of people leave their spirits behind in lines of blurred light. Layers of time acknowledging lives that once walked these streets.
Each photos asks - what have we done in our time, to our world and with our existence?
We fall. We fail.
As the opus nears its end, we see heavily cropped, grainy photos of featureless faces.
Each grain an atom. Slowly dissolving into space.
“We are all just specks of dust — insects in this vast universe.”
This monumental book moves me each time I look at it. Soon I shall summon the energy to look at it again.
Notes:
Never Goodbye by Max Richter was playing when he started scanning the first negatives for the book.
To get one photo just right, he used 100 rolls of film… 3600 clicks of the shutter. One keeper.
He pushes his camera to the limits... “Working with different film settings, apertures, and darkroom developer concentrations, Parke increased exposure times in the Australian sun to 10 seconds, creating images that show the blurs of people drifting like ghosts through city streets. The problem was it took hours to even make one print in the darkroom.” (Magnum Photos).
It’s too early to say if this will be a desert island photobook, but I think it could be.
So beautiful it’s terrifying.
Amazing, evocative and provocative work. Thanks for the share, Andrew.