Esther Parada's ‘Digital Revisions’

Abstract

The work of Esther Parada resonates with the Chicago tradition of experimental photography but with a decisively activist fervour born of the 1960s. Her themes impinge on the neglected confluence of public and private domains, the stories of lives omitted from official record, and the frank negotiation of personal accountability in response to political dissembling and disingenuousness. Though Chicago itself continues to be thoroughly inscribed in her life and her work, reflected in projects that tell of the crucial importance of black Americans, women, and urban landscaping in the history of the city, her perspectives are truly global in scope - as wide ranging as Nicaragua, England, and India. As an educator in photography at the School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois, Chicago, she deserves special consideration as having exemplified the visionary practice and critical teaching of the medium established in 1937 by László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus. Indeed, she did graduate studies at the Institute of Design, where she came in contact with such innovative artists as Aaron Siskind, Arthur Siegel, and Joseph Jachna.¹ Parada, however, has broken new ground as one of the fJISt photographers to make the jump from the analogue or film-based photograph to the digital image, which she has deployed as part of an extended interventionist strategy of collage in order to pose alternative views to the limited narratives of privileged political and social institutions.