Olivia Parker isn’t afraid of the dark. In fact, she’s drawn to it – pulled in by the idea that darkness can be a condition of creation rather than destruction. It’s a theory she first encountered in Richard Hell’s collection of essays, Massive Pissed Love – a brief mention that sent her down a rabbit hole. “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 take on a supernatural glow under Parker’s flash; a shotgun rests against a dirty quilted wall. The world through Parker’s lens is liminal, made up of spaces and scenes that occupy the in-between — beautiful, but eerie; comforting, yet strange. It’s a specific 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 project was shot over five years and spans locations from Ireland and France to Utah and Parker’s home state of Connecticut. When I ask how she scouts locations that share the same familiar yet uncanny feeling, she says, “They find me. I never have to look that hard. I just go on Google Maps.” What drives her, in part, is an impulse to document places that might otherwise slip through 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 collection was shot on a many-models-ago iPhone, Parker’s camera of choice when she’s not shooting film. The hazy digital glow it produces has become something of a signature for the New York-based photographer. “I like the dreaminess,” she offers. “It adds to the feeling I have when I look into those worlds.” Her consistency of camera lends a sense of continuity to the images, even though they weren’t shot with a series in mind. “I had so many photos that I wanted to consolidate them into something where I could find a through-line,” she explains of the book’s origin, “and then I could take that and keep moving forward with that frequency.”

Parker’s subjects (who are almost entirely her friends) are likely recognisable to those familiar with a certain set of twenty-something It Girls living in Los Angeles and New York City. There’s the indie actress Lily McInerny, running across a frosty field in pink tulle, and the model Sirena Warren in nothing but a fur coat against a screen of summer green lushness – a location Parker reveals to be her grandmother’s home in Connecticut. Her intimate relationships with her subjects are key to her practice, as she explains through 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 kind of familiarity extends across 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 adds, that lets her subjects exist in front of her lens without 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 only her subjects Parker wants to protect. Despite her exploration of darkness, she’s after that ever-corroding state of innocence. "I think the world works against our innocence and you have to be cognizant of working to maintain it,” she says. Innocence is what allows us to see the mundane through magical eyes, to peer into the darkness and make a story out of it – the way Parker has in this body of work. As she puts it, “Our innocence is what keeps our dreams alive.”

To That the Sides of the Dark is available at Friends Editions now.