In Order of Imagination: The Photographs of Olivia Parker, now at the Peabody Essex Museum, Parker creates intimate moments through a variety of subject matter. Throughout the exhibition, delicate details, either gorgeously documented in black and white or digitally manipulated, create visual puzzles that unfold before our eyes.
For a recent series documenting her late husband’s decline into dementia at the hands of Alzheimer’s, Parker examined the clues he left behind for himself, in the form of hand-written notes on scraps of paper. Titled Vanishing in Plain Sight, the heart-wrenching collection of notes, photographed in refracting light beams, gives us a visceral sense of his terrifying loss and the everyday struggle to reconstruct his memories, grasping at what is being lost.
