Esther Parada: 1938-2005

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by James Rajotte

Artist Esther Parada died on October 19, 2005, in her Chicago, Illinois, home after a three-year battle with gastrointestinal stromal cell cancer; she was sixty-seven. Parada, whose work focused on the political, historical, and social relations between the United States and Latin America, had been a photography professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, since 1974. Parada served with the Peace Corps in the 1960s as an art instructor at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas at Universidad de San Francisco Xavier in Bolivia, where she learned to speak Spanish.

Some of Parada's photographic works, including Past Recovery (1979) and Memory Warp (1980), which layer images and text related to family history, are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In the mid 1980s, Parada pioneered the use of digital media, creating photomontages focused on cultural representation. These works, which include The Monroe Doctrine: Theme and Variations (1987), Define/Defy the Frame (1990), A Thousand Centuries (1992), Native Fruits (1992), and At the Margin (1991), are featured in various publications such as In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (1990) by Fred Ritchin; Iterations: The New Image (1994), edited by Timothy Druckery; A World History of Photography (1984) and A History of Women Photographers (1997), both by Naomi Rosenblum; and Reframings: New American Feminist Photographies (1998) by Diane Neumaier.

Parada's published, written work includes the critical essay "C/Overt Ideology: Two Images of Revolution," first published in Afterimage and later included in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (1989), edited by Richard Bolton. Parada's writings were also published in Exposure and Aperture.

see

ARTICLES BY ESTHER PARADA PUBLISHED IN AFTERIMAGE:

"Notes on Latin American photography," Volume 9, no. 4 (November 1981)

"Home products: notes on history, photography, and cultural politics in Cuba" Volume 10, no. 5 (December 1982)

"C/Overt ideology: two images of revolution," Volume 11, no. 8 (March 1984)

"An Open Letter to the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts," with Paul Berger, James Enyeart, Andy Grundberg, David L. Jacobs, Carol Kismaric, Mark Klett, James Pomeroy, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Carol Squiers, Evon Streetman, and Anne Tucker, Volume 14, no. 6 (January 1987)