Olivia Parker
Personal Background
Olivia Parker is an American photographer born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1941. She went to Wellesley College and graduated in 1963 with a degree in art history. From between 1963-1973, Parker had started a career in painting but in 1973, she started to explore photography. In 1978, she published Signs of Life photographs, 1983, She published Under the Looking Glass, and in 1987, she published Weighing The Planets. She has a total of 15 different photo collections. Unfortunately in 1995, she had a skiing accident and lost all of her photos on her camera that she brought with her. Then a year later she received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award
Style
Olivia Parker is a fine arts/still-life photographer. She uses natural lighting and started her career with natural objects and later added man-made objects to her collages. Parker had also experimented with a variety of camera formats from 4x5 to 12x12 in black and white and up to 20x24 in polaroid color. Then she later transitioned to digital photography after her skiing accident and found even more ways to make photographs.
Philosophy
"The themes in my work include: diagrams of the unseeable, words considered for both their verbal and visual presence, games, double meanings, maps, an interplay of natural and man-made structures, pure gesture, perspectives of how different things are thought of at different times, things taken apart and reassembled in the present."
- Olivia Parker
- Olivia Parker
Compare and Contrast
For this picture I tried to focus more on the die rather than the background. One small problem with the die was that the sides didn't match up with the sides on the original photo, four and three were on opposite sides, and tried to get it as close as possible. I used a keyboard as a way so signify the small black tiles and I also had red walls in my house with I used for the background.
This photo was quite hard because my camera didn't want to focus and when I had started taking these photo my Christmas decorations were up and I couldn't find and good places to take this picture. I tired to use the lighting as much as possible and used a wide brown table as a replacement for the stool. The problem with the stool is that it reflected the paper balls.
This was on of the easiest photos to take and I had the best spot of this. aside from the tiles, I was almost able to get similar lighting as the original photo but there was two problems. The first problem was the I didn't have enough clips and I didn't have time to buy more clips. The second problem was I didn't have a plain white background so I had settled for the white tile hoping it would give the same effect.
Sources
https://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/blog/photographer-convos/olivia-parker/
https://iphf.org/inductees/olivia-parker/
https://www.oliviaparker.com/
https://www.photographydealers.com/artists/olivia-parker/
https://iphf.org/inductees/olivia-parker/
https://www.oliviaparker.com/
https://www.photographydealers.com/artists/olivia-parker/