External links
- Official website
- "ICP Lecture Series 2010: Susan Lipper" (video) – Lipper describes her career
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Susan Lipper (born 1953) is an American photographer, based in New York City. [1] [2] Her books include the trilogy Grapevine (1994), Trip (2000) and Domesticated Land (2018). [3] Lipper has said that all of her work is "subjective documentary". [4]
Grapevine was shown in solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery in London and Arnolfini in Bristol, UK in 1994. [5] She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. [6] Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art [1] and New York Public Library in New York City, [7] Minneapolis Institute of Art, [8] Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, [9] Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, [10] and the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London. [11] [12]
Lipper was born and raised in New York City. She studied English Romantic poetry in college with a concentration on W. B. Yeats.She received an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 1983. [13]
Lipper uses a medium format camera, sometimes with attached flash. [14] [15]
Her first book, Innocence & the Birth of Jealousy (1974), combines photography and poetry. According to David Solo writing in The PhotoBook Review, the book "offers a single, tightly integrated meditation on narcissism and its effects on relationships." Lipper appears in a set of dance-like poses, photographed by Penny Slinger, while Lipper was studying English literature in London. "When Lipper reviewed the contact sheets, the idea of the sequence/story emerged, and she wrote the accompanying narrative poem". The book was published by Martin Booth under his Omphalos imprint. [16]
After returning to the United States, Lipper developed her more recognized style, as seen in the book trilogy Grapevine (1994), Trip (2004), and Domesticated Land (2018). [16]
For about 20 years she has been visiting and photographing a tiny community in Grapevine Hollow in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, eastern United States. [4] [17] The photographs she made there between 1988 and 1994, in collaboration with her subjects the residents, became Grapevine. [4] [3] The critic Gerry Badger has written that "Community, family, and gender relationships seem to be at the core of her investigation." [3] Lipper's collaborative approach distinguishes Grapevine from social documentary photography; [3] she describes it as "subjective documentary" and that "we were creating fictional images together [. . .] they knew the narratives I was playing around with as well as I did." [4] Izabela Radwanska Zhang wrote in the British Journal of Photography that it "challenges our belief in images labelled 'photojournalism', by interweaving a theatrical element. Lipper asked her models to assume characters that could essentially be them in the images; the result is a slippery, mysterious work." [18] Parr and Badger include Grapevine in the third volume of The Photobook: A History. [19]
Trip, made between 1993 and 1999, paired road trip photographs of urban landscapes and interiors with writing by Frederick Barthelme. [3] [20] [21] Domesticated Land was made between 2012 and 2016 in the California desert. [2] [20]
Lipper's work is held in the following permanent collections:
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