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's 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]
Bed and Breakfast. Country life 4. Maidstone, UK: Photoworks, 2000. ISBN9780951742730. Edited by Val Williams. With an essay by David Chandler. Edition of 1000 copies.