In the context of Photoquai 2011, the Australian Embassy in Paris is honoured to present in collaboration with Magnum Photos; Minutes to Midnight and Coming Soon by Trent Parke and Between Worlds by Polixeni Papapetrou.
Minutes to Midnight
“2003. The future of the biggest island in the world is hanging by a thread. In the big cities, people live in the shadow of terrorism. The majority of the population think that the country is at the end of an era, that of innocence…
2005. Nearly two years have passed and I have travelled 90,000 kilometres across Australia between page and brush. Minutes to Midnight recounts this voyage, an attempt to find my place in an Australia infinitely different from the one in which I grew up. This is what I saw.”
Trent Parke, January 2005
Coming Soon
“When photographing in black and white, I always attempted to deal with the emotion of the time I lived in and in particular within my home country, Australia. Now that I have made the move to colour I have found that I really want to put together a body of work that looks at the physicality of contemporary Australia.
This is the start of a big project that will concentrate mainly on the exploration of urban Australia with an emphasis on all the major cities. Everything is BIG. Big streets, big skies, big signs, big light, big country. Each city is quite unique in its characteristics…. (…)
The work looks at a variety of issues including Australia’s rapidly changing coastline. Fifty years ago, it was sprinkled with small towns. Today the majority of Australians live literally on the coast. The modern world is a consumer’s world; everywhere we look, just in case we forgot, we are reminded to buy, buy, buy.”
Trent Parke, June 2006
Between Worlds
Between Worlds is a theatrical bestiary. The children in these photographs are portrayed as animals to explore the magical affinity that children have with animals. The children appear as something we immediately recognize, but they have been fantastically hybridized to reveal their in-between state, between the worlds of infancy and adulthood. The children wear animal masks, allowing them to inhabit an intermediary position that separates them from adults and dissociating human from animal. While founded on the absurd, the work of Polixeni Papapetrou presents children as animals due to the emotional relationship they have with the animals. Children encounter them every day through books, their cuddly toys, cartoons, their imagination, not to mention the marvellous stories of Lewis Carroll. The theatrical nature of these photographs is reinforced by the costumes and masks, together with the vision of sumptuous Australian landscapes between land and sea, forest and plain, earth and sky. Within these ambiguities, Polixeni Papapetrou attempts to explore the space that children occupy in our cultural understanding and how they might also be engulfed in the world of creation.
