Bookshelf - Trent Parke - Dream/Life

Some photobooks invite you to sit back and take them in. Others pull you into their current and don’t let go. Trent Parke’s Dream/Life (1999) falls firmly into the latter category—a book that takes Sydney and shows it not as a postcard city, but as a restless, dreamlike place full of drama and disquiet.

Parke’s Sydney is a city of hard light and deep shadow. Streets fracture into sharp geometries; rain turns windscreens into liquid abstraction; crowds move like figures caught in the glare of a stage. The mood is urgent and unsettled. As critic David Campany once observed, “the best street photography is less about streets than states of mind.” Dream/Life makes that idea tangible—what Parke is really photographing is atmosphere, the feeling of being alive in the city.

Parke himself has said he photographs “what it feels like, not what it looks like,” and the book makes sense on those terms. Children spin into blur on a playground, headlights explode into the night, people are reduced to silhouettes on the edge of visibility. The ordinary tips into the surreal, and the line between the two never quite resolves.

The book’s sequencing keeps the tension high. There are no easy pauses, no neat conclusions—just a stream of images that hover somewhere between documentary and hallucination. Roland Barthes once called photographs “certificates of presence,” but Parke’s feel more like fragments of memory or dream, recognisable but unstable.

What makes Dream/Life so compelling, even now, is that it refuses to settle. It’s not just a record of a city at a particular time, but an experiment in how far photography can be pushed to capture mood, energy, even unease. As Gerry Badger wrote of the best photobooks, they work as both “mirror and lamp”—reflecting the world while also shining light on the photographer’s inner vision. Parke manages both with unusual force.

More than two decades on, Dream/Life still feels like a landmark. It reminds us that the photobook is not only about showing us places, but about carrying us into a state of mind.