After graduating from Wellesley College in 1963
with a degree in Art History, Olivia Parker began her career as
a painter. She became intrigued with photography in 1970. Mostly
self-taught in photography, she usually constructs what she photographs
in the studio. Her photographs are fundamentally still life inspired
by those painted in the traditional Dutch, Flemish and Spanish
17th century style, with their torn petals, sumptuous but imperfect
fruit and improbable insects. Parker feels that photographic still
life is still an open arena precisely because of those intrinsic
qualities of this contemporary medium that distinguish it from
painting. She says that the expression of the classical ideals
of form is "dead matter" because the objects she chooses
to photograph, whether alive or dead, are instead all signs of
life. She is drawn to the implication of visual edges; the swollen
limits of a ripe pear touching a hard line or light downy feathers,
confined by a metal grid. Her photographs ask viewers to continually
evaluate their meaning by never truly defining where the eye comes
to rest.
Olivia Parker has had more than a hundred one-person exhibitions
in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in
several major private, corporate and museum collections. She has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Museum of Fine Arts - Boston and International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. There have been three monographs of her work published (Godine and New York Graphic Society).
Photography West Gallery inventories early vintage prints produced in small limited editions from Olivia Parker's pre-digital period, that are either silver halide, split toned or dye transfer.