Olivia Parker’s Photography Retrospective Showcases her Mastery of Light
Olivia Parker was trained as a painter, but photography became her life’s work. “Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker,” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, through November 11, is her retrospective showcasing her mastery of light. Parker switched mediums in her 30s, after creating assemblages of objects found on nature walks in Manchester and elsewhere, like shells, feathers, and nautical charts. Early on, she experimented with such processes as gelatin silver printing, evident in Interior with Pears from 1979, and dye diffusion, as seen in Child, 1980. Her 2016 ink-jet prints also appear amid the exhibition’s 111 works.
