Monument by Trent Parke brings together photographs created over a 25-year period on the
streets of Sydney and Adelaide, Australia. The project is an imagined time capsule—if the
world were to end suddenly—to communicate the story of earth, a monument of Human Kind.
Monument takes the form of a single filmic narrative completely devoid of language, in which
the earth is approached from space.
Upon moving to the city of Sydney from a small Australian country town, Parke’s first
impression was of the sheer volume of people. At rush hour he would watch as the city’s
workers moved in mass, walking the great conveyor belt of life. The more Parke photographed
the rush hour, the more he was drawn to the light, following the sun as it shifted from one
street corner to another, all the while trying to make sense of the endless procession in front
of him.
