OLIVIA PARKER
Personal Background
American photographer Olivia Parker was born in 1941 and is 81 years old right now. She started photographing ephemeral constructions in 1973 after graduating from Wellesley College with a degree of Art history. She continued to photograph until a skiing accident in 1995 ended her view camera photography career. Parker was unable to work in a studio or a darkroom for a year, so she started working with computers and digital softwares. Her work has changed and improved because of this accident.
Style
Olivia Parker mainly has a style of still life by demonstrating through various modern technologies like Photoshop, Polaroid, Mac computers, and Cibachrome film. She did this while experimenting with light and staged studio constructions. Parker says that the utterance of the classical ideals of form is “dead matter” because the objects she uses to photograph are all symbols of life. Her photographs don’t have one true meaning. They can have different meanings depending on how the viewer sees them.
Philosophy
The ideology of Olivia Parker’s photographs seemed to be more personal and for her own amusement. She takes many images of shells because of her beliefs that all pictures retain the formal shell of the expected but perceive unexpected elements. She also says, “I am interested in the way people think about the unknown… New ideas form, the old are shattered, and sometimes old ideas pop up again among the new like graffiti on a wall.” Meaning she also had the intent to please and entertain society with her work. However, her series called ‘Vanishing in Plain Sight’ are theories of what happened in her husband’s mind when he was overcome by a disease.
Influences
Olivia Parker is inspired by those painted in the Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish 17th century. Their torn petals, imperfect fruit, and unique insects was the muze that she used in her artwork. She has inspired me to the same. Photographing by mixing modern and older techniques could be unique and special. In the future I would like to follow her work and potentially do the same.
Compare & Contrast
I think my recreation of the image is fairly similar to the original picture. I used 5 egg shells and a white background, like the original did. I even added the border lines. However, my image had more exposure because it was taken in pure sunlight and the shadows were wider and angled differently in my image.
These images are less similar then I wanted them to be. Parker's image has a lot of blur around the border of the plate, which mine doesn't have. My image clearly looks like a plate, where as hers just looks like a reflection. However, I was able to get a reflection of trees visible in my plate. Both of our images also have a solid, black background.
Though I couldn't get the background to be similar to the original, the subject of crumpled paper is the same. Parker's image seems to have subtle sunlight on it whereas mine has a lot more brightness and exposure. Also, my image has more of a reflection then a shadow, which the original image has.
Personal Artist Statement
Cracked represents a sign of life. Eggshells all look the same, identical even, but when cracked, the structure of each varies. This is a sign of life because when untouched, we all act the same, but when cracked, our true selves come out and bring out the best in us. Circle shows the reflections of nature that it has on us. The majority of our food sources come from many different plants. Scraps is a still life of work life. The piles of notes, stress, and tiredness is what this image is representing.
Sources
1. https://www.oliviaparker.com/copy-of-about
2. https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/olivia-parker
3. http://www.photographywest.com/pages/parker_bio.html
2. https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/olivia-parker
3. http://www.photographywest.com/pages/parker_bio.html
Images
Eggshells
1. https://www.oliviaparker.com/signs-of-life
Plate
2. https://www.oliviaparker.com/miscellanea-curiosa
John's Notes
3. https://www.oliviaparker.com/still-life-2001-2008
1. https://www.oliviaparker.com/signs-of-life
Plate
2. https://www.oliviaparker.com/miscellanea-curiosa
John's Notes
3. https://www.oliviaparker.com/still-life-2001-2008