Evelyn Hofer was born in 1937. Her flight from her native Germany during the Nazi regime and subsequent tutelage under two Swiss photographers occasioned the start of her quietly seminal career. She has photographed for more than forty years. Her long career includes early fashion shoots for Harper's Bazaar, books of photographs taken in Italy and Spain, and portraits and interiors for magazines such as Vogue and House and Garden. Described by Hilton Kramer as "one of the most accomplished living masters of the medium," Evelyn Hofer is as staid and proficient a photographer as she is autonomous and perspicacious. A superb portrait photographer and artistic innovator, Hofer prefigured the arrival of color photography to the sanctum of fine art. Her photographs are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, and David Rockefeller, Jr.

After graduating from Wellesley College with a degree in the History of Art, she began her career as a painter, and became involved in photography in 1970. Mostly self-taught in photography she makes ephemeral constructions to photograph and experiments with the endless possibilities of light. She has had more than one hundred one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and her work is represented in major private, corporate, and museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Portfolios of her work have been published in Art News, American Photographer, Camera, Camera Arts, The Sciences and numerous other magazines in the United States, Europe, and Japan. There have been three monographs of Parker's work: Signs of Life (Godine, 1978), Under the Looking Glass (New York Graphic Society, 1983), and Weighing The Planets (New York Graphic Society, 1987). She has lectured and conducted workshops extensively both in this country and abroad. In 1996 she received a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. Residencies include Dartmouth College in 1988, The MacDowell Colony in 1993 and The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1997. In 1998 she did the title sequence for the PBS Television documentary Africans in America. In 2002-3 Parker Photographed in Anhui Province, China for the Peabody Essex Museum.