Grapevine

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First edition first impression from 1994, there is creasing and a closed terar to the blank grey endpage, no other internal markings, pages clean, binding firm, The jacket has some very minor wear. About Susan Lipper’s photographs of Grapevine Hollow, West Virginia, are at once sumptuous and discordant. In a photographic tradition that owes much to the methodology of Walker Evans or Doris Ulmann, Lipper lived among her subjects intermittently over a five-year period. Her knowledge of these Appalachian mountaineers is intensely personal: her photographs are, in her words, her‘journal’. The expressive power of the formal elements in Lipper's photographs are considerable, but artful framing, dramatic perspective and intense values never destabilize the balance between intention and effect. In Lipper’s photographs the gap between the photographer and those photographed is narrow. She has not fetishized a remote American sub-culture especially hard-hit by social neglect but rather unearthed the instinctual drives of eros/thanatos, instincts that defy class or privilege and which preserve, destroy and passionately connect all human beings. Show more