An American photographer who’s work includes a project and book called ‘Grapevine’ (1994), which is why I’m researching her. For about 20 years she has been traveling to a small community in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia called Grapevine Hollow. The images were produced between 1988 and 1994. 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”.
Grapevine Hollow consists of few trailers and mobile homes of about 50 residents in the middle of a part of the United States badly hit by the decline of the coal industry, where alternative industries include distilling moonshine, and the newer initiative of cultivating marijuana. Lipper found the community while on a cross-country trip.
Her personal commitment to the community not just as subjects, but as people and as friends, yet Lipper uses the words of Richard Avedon: “My photographs are works of fiction. Any truth you see is my truth.” I don’t believe that her images are in any way artificial, dishonest, or unauthentic. “This series of pictures is my journal,” she says of the Grapevine project.
“I began photographing in Grapevine because it was as far removed from the life I knew in New York City as it was possible to be,” Lipper says. Grapevine Hollow is said to be a typical small rural settlement, an isolated cluster of single or multigenerational family units, most of them interrelated. In a similar way to the work of Soth human relationships lie at the core of Susan Lipper’s work. She has said that she was drawn to Grapevine because of its people and family.
As Gerry Badger (The Pleasures of Good Photographs, New York: Aperture, 2010) states that there is —‘a basic theme of Grapevine’, I would suggest, ‘is claustrophobia, the effect of barriers and fences, both material and psychological, which press in upon us, shaping our lives and circumscribing our ambitions. Enclosures, and the desperate measures taken to break free of them, is surely a primary leitmotif, from the wooded walls of the valley itself, to the four walls of domesticity that enclose women saddled with kids at an early age, to the ring fence of boredom around the men, most of them without regular work, to the tight, enclosed society created by geographical isolation. And yet, as Lipper points out, the isolation and claustrophobia cut both ways. What some might rather melodramatically see as a grave, could also be seen as a womb. In their isolation, and enforced indolence, the inhabitants of Grapevine might feel safe and protected, free from real responsibilities, except within their own world.’
It was interesting to learn that she uses a Hasselblad so another push for me to use mine. She works in series and seems to work towards the final product. She works hard to gain collaboration with both the subject and the viewer. The images are staged that highlight the division between male and female. The works and series her images in a cinematic style. The females she states are depicted as either the mother or a whore.
Bibliography
Research
Access 23/12/19
https://www.susanlipper.com/text_gv_badger_1.html
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/13/susan-lipper-grapevine-series-south
https://susanlipper.com/text_gv_edwards.html
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/susan-lipper-grapevine-higher-pictures-201216
Michele Usher 