Opening: Susan Lipper at Higher Pictures
When the photographer Susan Lipper traveled to Grapevine, a small town in West Virginia, she was accepted by the community, even though she was a complete stranger to the town’s residents. It’s easy to imagine what happened next—Lipper took intimate photos of the people of Grapevine using a medium-format black-and-white camera. The catch: Lipper allowed her subjects to perform for the camera; she didn’t take her pictures entirely on the fly. The resulting 1988–92 photo-series, named after Grapevine, captured people blowing smoke into each other’s mouths, dangling children over tabletops, and donning Ku Klux Klan uniforms. This show will include 14 works from this series, which revised the very idea of documentary photography.