Coming Soon

In the early 2000s Trent Parke embarked on a a series of road trips across Australia's east, south and west coasts, at a moment when the country was quietly becoming something other than it had been. The corner stores and distinct character of its coastal towns were disappearing, replaced by something more familiar and altogether less specific. Globalisation had arrived in Australia.

"After travelling the country on our road trip around Australia in 2003/04, what hit me was how quickly the small coastal towns were changing. The places we used to go to as kids on family holidays were being torn down and developed at a rapid rate. Witnessing the mass development that was taking place, I wanted to record what it physically looked like before it changed forever. In order to do that, I needed to shoot colour. I wanted to be able to read and see every small detail. How much things cost, the flux of everything moving, the advance of technology, and of course the continual study of light and time."

Working in colour on medium format film, Parke followed the primary colours of advertising signs, cheap motels, shop windows and the severe Australian light, through immersive images that take us from the outback, through fading coastal towns and artificial paradises, to the city, where people are surrounded on all sides and yet completely alone. Australia, as much of the world did at that moment, appears in the brief window when you could still see both things at once, caught between what it had been and whatever was coming next.

In this new world of big TVs, towering billboards, infinite skyscrapers and upsized everything, Coming Soon is presented as an oversized volume with multiple gatefolds. Its cover draws on the newspapers once hung in the windows of shuttered shops. Artist Jesse Feinman has taken fragments from Parke's photographs and reworked them into new compositions, each carrying something of the emotional charge of the original images.