Susan Lipper


Susan Lipper is an American photographer, based in New York City. Her books include Grapevine, for which she is best known, Trip and Domesticated Land.
Lipper has said all of her work is "subjective documentary"; the critic Gerry Badger has said many describe it as "ominous".
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York Public Library in New York City, and the National Portrait Gallery, London

Life and work

Lipper received an MFA in photography from Yale University in 1983. She uses a medium format camera, a Hasselblad, sometimes with attached flash.
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. The photographs she made there between 1988 and 1994, in collaboration with her subjects the residents, became her first book Grapevine. The critic Gerry Badger has written that "Community, family, and gender relationships seem to be at the core of her investigation." Lipper's collaborative approach distinguishes Grapevine from social documentary photography; she describes it as "subjective documentary".
Trip, made between 1993 and 1999, paired photographs of urban landscapes and interiors—made whilst driving back and forth between New York City and Grapevine Hollow—with writing by Frederick Barthelme. Domesticated Land was made between 2012 and 2016 in the California desert.

Publications

Publications by Lipper

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