Susan Lipper

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]

Early life and education

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]

Life and work

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]

Publications

Books of work by Lipper

• Innocence & the Birth of Jealousy. Rushden, UK: Omphalos, 1974.^[16]
• Grapevine: Photographs by Susan Lipper. Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 1994. ISBN 0-948797-13-4.
  • New York: powerHouse, 1997. ISBN 1576870235.
• Trip. Photographs by Lipper with accompanying short texts by Frederick Barthelme. With an afterword by Matthew Drutt.
  • Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis, 2000. ISBN 1-899235-52-3.
  • Brooklyn, New York: powerHouse, 2000. ISBN 1576870510.
• Bed and Breakfast. Country life 4. Maidstone, UK: Photoworks, 2000. ISBN 9780951742730. Edited by Val Williams. With an essay by David Chandler. Edition of 1000 copies.
• Domesticated Land. London: Mack, 2018. ISBN 9781912339037.

Books with contributions by Lipper

• Who's Looking at the Family?. Manchester, UK: Cornerhouse, 1994. Edited by Val Williams. ISBN 978-0946372324.
• How We Are: Photographing Britain from the 1840s to the Present. Edited by Val Williams and Susan Bright. London: Tate, 2007. ISBN 978-1-85437-714-2.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

• Grapevine Hollow, The Photographers' Gallery, London, 1994^[5]
• Grapevine, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, 1994^[22][23]
• Grapevine: Photographs by Susan Lipper, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, 1995^[24]

Group exhibitions

• Who's Looking at the Family, Barbican Centre, London, May–September 1994^[25]

Awards

• 2015: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation^[6]

Collections

Lipper's work is held in the following permanent collections:

• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: 2 prints (as of 11 April 2023)^[1]
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota: 1 print (as of 30 August 2021)^[8]
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: 5 prints (as of 11 April 2023)^[9]
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: 2 prints (as of 7 October 2024)^[10]
• National Portrait Gallery, London: 4 prints^[12]
• New York Public Library, New York City^[7]
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 7 prints (as of 30 August 2021)^[11]