Trent Parke the Black Rose
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TRENT PARKE THE BLACK ROSE © ATOM 2015 A STUDY GUIDE BY MARGUERITE O’HARA http://www.metromagazine.com.au ISBN: 978-1-74295-580-3 http://www.theeducationshop.com.au CONTENTS: 3 CURRICULUM GUIDELINES • 4 PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN ART FORM – WAYS OF SEEING • 5 ACTIVITY – PRE-VIEWING QUESTIONS • 8 ACTIVITY – AFTER WATCHING THE DOCUMENTARY • 10 ACTIVITY • 10 PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES • 13 REFERENCES AND RESOURCES ‘Photography is an extension Overview of every thought that I have. Trent Parke is an Australian artist with an interna- tional reputation. The medium he works in is prin- It’s almost linked to my hand cipally photography. This documentary about his in a way that it becomes part life and work was made as Parke was setting up a large exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia of you. I don’t think about as part of the 2015 Adelaide Festival. photography as making The exhibition, The Black Rose, is the culmination something for art or making of seven year’s work for Adelaide-based photog- rapher Parke. Featuring his extraordinary photo- it for the walls of a show, it’s graphs, light boxes, video, written texts and books, the exhibition leads viewers through a visual narra- never about that. It’s always tive that explores ideas concerning the ‘meaning of 2015 © ATOM SCREEN EDUCATION for me just about finding the life’ on both a personal and universal level. answers to life. That’s what I’m Featuring interviews with Parke’s wife, artist Narelle Autio and Art Gallery of South Australia director looking for .’ Nick Mitzevich, The Black Rose provides a glimpse – Trent Parke into the world of Trent Parke and the factors that inform and shape his work. 2 Curriculum Guidelines This guide is written to accompany Catherine Hunter’s The Black Rose would be an excellent film to show students documentary film about Trent Parke. The film focuses on in English classes working on a variety of approaches to the most recent exhibition of his work – The Black Rose developing and presenting narratives and personal histories – at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The documentary through juxtaposing images and words to illustrate and re- and this guide offer an introduction to Parke’s work as an create memories. important Australian artist. For Media Studies students the film is a good example By using the online references in this guide, students can of how the work of an artist can best be appreciated and see much more of Parke’s work than can be shown in a understood through an awareness of the artist’s key life half-hour documentary film. experiences. What happened in the past is shown to be integral to the artist’s style and evolving creative output. The program is suitable for middle and senior secondary students as well as tertiary students working in a number Parke’s work invites us to think about how experiences of of Visual Arts and Design subjects, including Photography, death, birth, pain, loss and the passage of time can help as well as students of Media Arts and English. The student us create dynamic and original artistic representations of activities in this guide are essentially linked to the strands these big life issues. of ‘Responding’ and ‘Making’. Learning opportunities offered through watching the film, particularly in the area of visual literacy, include: - considering how contemporary artists develop repre- sentations of themes, concepts and subject matter - evaluating how such representations communicate artistic intentions and views which students can relate 2015 © ATOM SCREEN EDUCATION to their own visual and written work - responding to images and written ideas that create a narrative using a range of presentations - discussing the five major visual themes inThe Black Rose exhibition into which Parke’s work can be grouped: Self-portraits; Home/Childhood; Trees/Plants; Sea/Sea Creatures and The Road/Road trip. 3 THE FILMMAKERS Director: Catherine Hunter Cinematographer and Editor: Bruce Inglis Producers: Catherine Hunter, Julia Overton Composer: Amanda Brown Today, with the development of digital technology, many Photography of us may call ourselves photographers, recording people as an art form – and places and uploading images onto our computers and out into the online world. We can crop and adjust our ways of seeing pictures, post them on social networking sites and email them to others; we can create large prints of people and What do I see? I see light. Extra depth, tone and detail. I places to adorn our walls. But, how many of us have an see shapes – triangles, circles, squares – distortions of all eye for seeing and capturing moments and places in a way the above. I see light in black. I see ordinary objects – flow- that makes them more than a straightforward visual record ers, rocks, sticks, foam. Seaweed, light bulbs, oil stains, of what we have seen and where we have been; that turns traffic signs. I see life –Trent Parke photos into truly memorable images that convey some- thing fundamental and even spiritual and emotional about In an age where we are all photographers of a kind – cap- the subject? turing images of people and places on our mobile devices and digital cameras – the work of photographers like Trent Photography is one of the youngest of the visual arts. Parke is a reminder that sets and sequences of images See a capsule history of photography at http://photo.net/ can tell stories across time and place. The organisation of history/timeline. the images re-creates the patterns of our lives. Parke is a storyteller who uses both images and words to document History only began to be recorded on film in 1890 and make sense of his own history and the change and when Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, continuity in his life. Images of Tenement Life in New York City. See: https://www. google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+the+other+half+lives Despite the enormous changes and developments in photography, some people still do not see photography as an art form as they believe we can all be photographers, capturing and transmitting images using a range of digital devices. It is true that as a result of rapidly evolving devel- opments in technology we can all take pictures, both still and moving, and record moments in our lives. However, producing images that tell a story that is both original and arresting is quite another matter, particularly when those 2015 © ATOM SCREEN EDUCATION images have not been subjected to digital manipulation through technology, but by the way the artist has worked with them in his dark room. Jeff Carter, an Australian photographer from an earlier era (1928 – 2010), best known for his pictures of country life in Australia, resisted being described as an artist. However, 4 The Black Rose n. {meaning} 1. Death, the darkness of loss he acknowledged that photos could be artistic creations: name them? • How important is the willingness of the photographer The moment a photographer goes beyond printing a to find interest and beauty in spaces, faces and places ‘straight’ image from the negative, even just by darkening the that others might reject as dreary, ugly or mundane? sky, he is venturing into artistic creation. Most of the images I • How can photographs best be viewed? have produced for publication or display have been en- • In what ways does size matter when we are viewing hanced via the traditional darkroom techniques of cropping, images? burning in, contrast changing and toning’. Jeff Carter • What is the difference between seeing images repro- duced in a book, on a phone sized screen, a television As Geoff Dyer, writer and critic, wonders in this film, quot- screen, a cinema screen or on a gallery wall? Have you ing writer Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as ‘news that ever been surprised on seeing a work of art or an im- stays news’, could this definition of literature also be used age you have seen reproduced many times on screen, about Trent Parke’s photography, a mix of visual, still and in its original location, in real time at its real size? moving images and words that transcends traditional ideas • What role does lighting – both natural and artificial – of photography? play in how we see things, record them and present them in public? • How does video art – a type of art which relies on mov- ing pictures and comprises video and/or audio data – (It should not however be confused with television Activity – production or experimental film) offer further creative pre-viewing questions means for expressing ideas and images to an artist? • Why do you think some photographers (and video art- Trent Parke – the Black Rose ists) today choose to work in black and white? Before watching this film about Trent Parke and his work, discuss some or all of the following questions: • How do you think family background and early life expe- riences may inhibit or encourage our creativity to under- stand and respond to the world through telling stories? • In what ways do place, space and light tend to play an important role in how visual artists present images of their world? 2015 © ATOM SCREEN EDUCATION • To what extent does readily available technology pro- vide us with the means to capture arresting and original images? • Why might some photographers decide not to use digital cameras for their work? • What do you think the expression ‘Ways of Seeing’ means? Do we see things before we use words to 5 Who is Trent Parke? Characteristics of I’ve always seen myself shooting in a way that was just personal.