Join us for a talk with photographer Olivia Parker via Zoom. “Still lifes juxtapose objects to depict the comfort found in a table with food or a vase of flowers or to show the despair of the vanitas or momento mori. These images retain the formal shell of the genre, but have elements of the unexpected. Still life has sometimes been dismissed as insignificant, yet still lifes remain. I think that their persistence has to do with their proximity to the most basic concerns of human life: food, shelter, sex (with its associations of life and growth), and death.”

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1963 with a degree in Art History, Olivia Parker began her career as a painter. She became intrigued with photography in 1970. Mostly self-taught in photography, Parker makes ephemeral constructs to photographs and explores the endless possibilities of light. Parker feels that photographic still life is still an open arena, because the intrinsic qualities of this contemporary medium distinguish it from painting.