Olivia Parker isn’t afraid of the darkish. In reality, she’s drawn to it – pulled in by the concept darkness is usually a situation of creation somewhat than destruction. It’s a idea she first encountered in Richard Hell’s assortment of essays, Massive Pissed Love – a short point out that despatched her down a rabbit gap. “Darkness isn’t evil, but a representation of something closer to imagination… closer to the part of ourselves that doesn’t fit neatly into reality,” she explains.
Parker’s interrogation of darkness is captured in her debut photobook, aptly titled To That the Sides of the Dark. Girls traverse gloomy landscapes and sit stock-still in dated, worn-out interiors; an albino horse’s eyes tackle a supernatural glow below Parker’s flash; a shotgun rests towards a grimy quilted wall. The world via Parker’s lens is liminal, made up of areas and scenes that occupy the in-between — lovely, however eerie; comforting, but unusual. It’s a particular feeling she’s after: “That moment in a dream just before you wake up, where it feels weird and it feels ordinary. There’s something kind of strange and you can’t really place it.”
The venture was shot over 5 years and spans places from Ireland and France to Utah and Parker’s house state of Connecticut. When I ask how she scouts places that share the identical acquainted but uncanny feeling, she says, “They find me. I never have to look that hard. I just go on Google Maps.” What drives her, partially, is an impulse to doc locations that may in any other case slip via the cracks. “The only past that exists is part of the present, and everything else is forgotten forever,” she says. “It feels weird to go somewhere and see something and then just let it fall into the darkness forever. It’s like bringing light to these secret places in the world.”
The assortment was shot on a many-models-ago iPhone, Parker’s digicam of alternative when she’s not capturing movie. The hazy digital glow it produces has develop into one thing of a signature for the New York-based photographer. “I like the dreaminess,” she provides. “It adds to the feeling I have when I look into those worlds.” Her consistency of digicam lends a way of continuity to the pictures, despite the fact that they weren’t shot with a sequence in thoughts. “I had so many photos that I wanted to consolidate them into something where I could find a through-line,” she explains of the e-book’s origin, “and then I could take that and keep moving forward with that frequency.”
Parker’s topics (who’re virtually totally her pals) are possible recognisable to these conversant in a sure set of twenty-something It Girls residing in Los Angeles and New York City. There’s the indie actress Lily McInerny, operating throughout a frosty subject in pink tulle, and the mannequin Sirena Warren in nothing however a fur coat towards a display screen of summer season inexperienced lushness – a location Parker reveals to be her grandmother’s house in Connecticut. Her intimate relationships together with her topics are key to her apply, as she explains via her shoot with Warren: “I couldn’t have really taken her [to my grandmother’s home] if I hadn’t known her for years. We were able to have a more intimate experience together.”
That form of familiarity extends throughout most of Parker’s work. “I definitely have a few muses that I’ve been lucky enough to know for such a long amount of time, and continue to create work with,” she says. “And that’s nice because we can span time and space together in a way that feels very comfortable, and taking photos is just part of the experience.” It’s this closeness, she provides, that lets her topics exist in entrance of her lens with out self-consciousness. “There’s a sense of trust. I feel like I can provide them with a space where they feel comfortable enough to be photographed and make them feel as beautiful as I think they are”
It isn’t solely her topics Parker needs to guard. Despite her exploration of darkness, she’s after that ever-corroding state of innocence. “I believe the world works towards our innocence and you must be cognizant of working to keep up it,” she says. Innocence is what permits us to see the mundane via magical eyes, to look into the darkness and make a narrative out of it – the way in which Parker has on this physique of labor. As she places it, “Our innocence is what keeps our dreams alive.”
To That the Sides of the Dark is on the market at Friends Editions now.