PARKE, Trent - Crimson Line / AS 2ND PRINT RUN

Background information

"Born in the Australian steel city of Newcastle, one of Trent PARKE’S only early childhood memories is accompanying his mother to pick his dad up from work, travelling through a landscape dominated by ship yards, chimneys, and the BHP steelworks. Throughout his career Trent PARKE has always been interested in the transformative powers of light, but it was the ephemeral changing colors of dawn and dusk, the multitude or different reds that made him curious about the color crimson. He discovered the colour that is used in commercial products is harvested from the crushed and boiled bodies of the female scale insect, the Cochineal. A tiny minute insect who inhabits the pads of the prickly pear cactus and who are farmed for their crimson dye. A dye now used primarily in cosmetics and food colouring.

Scarlet, magenta, orange, and crimson, are the colored dyes produced by the Cochineal and also seem to feature spectacularly in the colours of creation, as seen in an Eagle Nebula during the birth of a new star and recorded by the Hubble space telescope. These colors of birth and blood Trent PARKE also remembers from the bath water, the umbilical cord and placenta, at the birth of his sons.

Additional information

After the first edition sold out in just five days this new evolved edition brings subtle changes to the mesmeric series including three never before seen images." (© Stanley/Barker, 2019)

About the Australian Magnum photographer, Trent PARKE (b.1971, in Newcastle, AUS)

Photo books by Trent PARKE