Susan Lipper

Susan Lipper (born 1953) is an American photographer, based in New York City. Her books include the trilogy Grapevine, Trip (2000) and Domesticated Land (2018). Lipper has said that all of her work is "subjective documentary".

Grapevine was shown in solo exhibitions at The Photographers' Gallery in London and Arnolfini in Bristol, UK in 1994. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

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.

Life and work Lipper uses a medium format camera, sometimes with attached flash.

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.

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). The photographs she made there between 1988 and 1994, in collaboration with her subjects the residents, became Grapevine. Parr and Badger include Grapevine in the third volume of The Photobook: A History.

Trip, made between 1993 and 1999, paired road trip photographs of urban landscapes and interiors with writing by Frederick Barthelme. Domesticated Land was made between 2012 and 2016 in the California desert. Grapevine: Photographs by Susan Lipper, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK, 1995

Group exhibitions Who's Looking at the Family, Barbican Centre, London, May–September 1994

Awards 2015: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

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