Monument is a monolithic 25-year retrospective of Trent Parke’s street photography in Sydney, reimagined as a cosmic time capsule. Inspired by the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft, the book features an embossed faux-leather cover with Earth’s coordinates. It contains no printed text; instead, the introduction is rendered in Morse code and the colophon in Braille on blind-stamped endsheets. A detachable steel plaque serves as the only reference to the author. The book’s narrative arc follows a “disintegration of the universe,” mirrored physically by paper weights that subtly decrease as the reader progresses through the 296 pages of high-contrast black-and-white imagery.
