Olivia Parker
Personal Background:
Olivia Parker was born in Boston, MA in 1941. She is a full time self taught photographer. She graduated from Wellesley college in 1963 with a degree in art history. For a while, Parker was a painter until she became interested in photography in 1970. She did mainly silver print photography until a skiing accident in 1995 prohibited her from working in a dark room, causing her to switch to digital photography. Her work is now in museums all around the world.
Style:
Olivia Parker is mainly known for her still life photography. She takes pictures of a large variety of things and often tells stories through her photos. Her photos are pretty minimalistic and commonly in black and white, but they are still very captivating and pretty. Through her photos, she shows the beauty in ordinary objects.
Philosophy:
Parker’s photos seem to mostly be personal. She takes pictures of a variety of objects, but they all seem to have meaning and the photos are always planned out with backgrounds and positions that fit the object well. One of her most well known series was inspired by her husband and his Alzheimer’s. This shows she puts a lot of meaning into her photos and they aren't just random.
Influences:
I only recently discovered Olivia Parker and her work, so she didn't have any influence on my past work. However, I really admire how she is able to show beauty in ordinary objects through her photography and I will definitely think about that while deciding what to take pictures of in the future. She also often uses a plain black or blurred background for her photos which adds a really cool effect and I could easily do that to improve some of my more simple photos. Overall, Parker has inspired me to put more thought into my object/ still life photos.
Compare and Contrast:
This photo was a lot harder to take than I thought it would be. it looks like her die was on some sort of tile, which I thought had a pretty similar size and color to the computer keys on my laptop. The next thing I was worried about was making the die look really worn out, I was originally going to paint over the black dots with white paint, but I found out that I could easily remove the black paint from the holes creating a more worn out look. Olivia clearly had a better camera than me and was able to create a better blur for the background than I was.
When I saw Olivia's picture, I thought it looked really cool and I wanted to try and recreate it for this assignment. It looked like her image was of a clear bottle filled with beads with a solid black background, I didn't have the same beads as her, but I did have a similar bottle. My picture doesn't look super similar to hers and it was hard to get the lighting to look good, but I think the colorful beads with the solid black background looks cool.