Moving bus

Trent Parke began to take photographs at the age of twelve, soon after his mother’s sudden death. Using his mother’s camera and darkroom, he set out to document the world around him. Moving bus belongs to Parke’s most significant and celebrated body of work, Minutes to Midnight. The series resulted from a two-year road trip around Australia with his partner, Narelle Autio, in 2003 and 2004. His intention was to ‘capture the mood and emotions of a still young and emerging nation before it significantly changed forever’. He was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography in 2003 to complete the project. Significantly, Parke is the only Australian to be a full member of the Magnum photo agency.

Moving bus is one of his most technically accomplished works. Although it is not immediately clear what the photograph depicts, the ghostly image is in fact the shadow cast onto the side of a moving bus by a crowd of people standing on a Sydney street.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs