Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 58 OCTOBER 2019 I N - D E P T H Walk into Olivia Parker's seaside studio and the first thing you notice is that the outdoors has been brought in—shells, feathers, and assorted bits of organic matter. Parker has been a big fan of the natural world since her childhood in the Boston area. Later, moving to Manchester-by-the-Sea with her husband in 1967, she took daily walks to gather kelp, driftwood, and shells of all shapes and sizes. These natural bits can be glimpsed in PEM's current exhibition, Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker, the first retrospective of the celebrated photographer's work. Parker's photography is represented in a number of major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and PEM, where visitors will find more than 100 intricately composed photographs that reflect the artist's wide creative range and unflagging curiosity, on view through November 11. For more than 40 years, Parker has created poetic and dreamy photographs that make us re-examine the familiar. Resisting any temptation to photograph the nearby woods or beaches, Parker prefers to experiment in her studio, mostly shooting downward toward her floor, where objects are arranged on paper, with natural light passing through the south-facing windows of her studio in the home she has lived in for more than 50 years. "It's a matter of how the object reacts with light more than the object itself," says Parker, who calls the reflective qualities of a broiling pan "fabulous." A found object may wait in her studio for decades before it's picked up and put before the camera. When she was at home with two young children, she worked with what was on hand. It wasn't until later that she started going to flea markets, such as Todd Farm in Rowley, where she recently came across glass fishing floats. "They're the biggest ones I've ever seen and they're crusted with barnacles and I really like them," she says with a mischievous smile. Among her treasures is a drawer of bones, big chunks of glass that reflect the light nicely, as well as jewel-toned glass bottles, old sepia negatives of strangers, small plastic figures and collections like a glass vase full of rubber bulb ear cleaners. One intriguing piece, haunting in its beauty, and surprising in its simplicity, is Moonsnails, an arrangement of snails in a corn muffin tin. Parker says she Olivia Parker studio Olivia Parker, Child, 1980. Dye diffusion print. © Olivia Parker Shell in a Landscape, 2011. Inkjet print. © Olivia Parker Olivia Parker, 1979. Gelatin silver print. © Olivia Parker PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC ROTH (TOP)