In Past Recovery, Esther Parada creates a history of her family in one work of one hundred images. The title and pictures invoke the artist’s past that is beyond recovery except through images and memory. She transforms the photograph of her great aunt’s and uncle’s wedding anniversary in 1920 into a composite family scrapbook by enlarging it and superimposing earlier photographic images of family members upon their pictures at the banquet. Parada wrote:
My sister’s face at age two [top center] is juxtaposed with her own image thirty years later and with that of a great aunt whom we never met, although family legend had it that they are cast in the same mold. Similarly, I see other members of that family gathering through the filter of my own cumulative experience.¹
The one hundred photographs that comprise this piece fill an entire wall. The individually framed photographs create a life-sized image, seen as if through window panes. The monumental, ambitious scale of this work reveals new ways in which photographers are approaching their medium. The diagonal table creates an axis around which the figures are grouped. The contrast of black and white and sepia, or brown, tones, like the overlapping and superimposing of images, creates a complex composition that evokes the passage of time and the jumbled nature of memory.
Esther Parada was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1938. She received a B.A. with honors in art, art history, and literature from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia in the early 1960s, she taught art and photography. She has worked as a graphic designer and, since 1975, has been associate professor of photography at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited extensively and she has published articles for newspapers and magazines.
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Target III: In Sequence (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1982), p. 9.
