"In the American west contemporary photographers often tread consciously in the wake of illustrious predecessors such as Timothy O’Sullivan who accompanied the great surveys that set out to map the country. In Australia the early expeditions were undocumented by photographers. What was discovered, in the absence of the picturesque, the spectacular or distinctive, was a daunting extent of emptiness. As a result, these expeditions were largely invisible affairs. Parke, of course, is by no means the first to make good this lack. But his method is one that shares an unlikely affinity with the kind of experience recorded in the journals of those early explorers. The lack of conventional ‘sights’ or landmarks meant that these journals lacked obvious narrative direction. So, asks the writer Paul Carter in his book Living in a New Country, ‘What is it that gives the discontinuous aggregation of details its narrative direction?’ The answer – but note, first, the concise characterisation of the typical photographic journey à la Frank contained by that question – is that the true subject of these explorer writings is ‘historical space – spatiality as historical experience.’ Or, to put it in terms borrowed from the fictional explorer, Voss, infinity as glimpsed at a particular moment in time or history."

— Geoff Dyer on Trent Parke

9:21 pm  •  25 January 2012