Susan Lipper (born 1953) is an American photographer, based in New York City.[1][2] Her books include Grapevine (1994), for which she is best known, Trip (2000) and Domesticated Land (2018).[3] Lipper has said that all of her work is "subjective documentary";[4] the critic Gerry Badger has said many describe it as "ominous".[3]
Lipper had a solo exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery, London in 1994[5] and 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] and the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[10][11]
Lipper was born and raised in New York City. She studied English Romantic poetry in college with a concentration on W. B. Yeats.[12]
She received an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1983.[13]
Lipper uses a medium format camera, a Hasselblad, sometimes with attached flash.[14][15]
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][16] The photographs she made there between 1988 and 1994, in collaboration with her subjects the residents, became her first book 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."[17]
Trip, made between 1993 and 1999, paired photographs of urban landscapes and interiors with writing by Frederick Barthelme.[3][18][19] Domesticated Land was made between 2012 and 2016 in the California desert.[2][18]
Lipper's work is held in the following permanent collections: