Photographer and teacher Marcia Lippman’s (b. 1944, New York) painterly photographs explore the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of memory. Influenced by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Rilke, and Barthes, among others, Lippman works with both traditional darkroom processes and contemporary digital techniques, and sees the photographs from her most recent series, Constellations (2014-2016), as a point of entry into painting and sculpture.
Writer and critic Lyle Rexer wrote in Photograph of Lippman’s exhibition at KMR Arts in 2013, “Clearly the preoccupation here was the classic one of reminiscence, of memory as a complex of impressions and associations, but constantly revised, never static. Lippman’s “museum” was as dynamic and open-ended as deck of tarot cards –ideal for plumbing the soul and reading the future.”
Marcia Lippman’s work has been the subject of two monographs: Sacred Encounters East and West (Edition Stemmle, 2000), which includes twenty years of photographs from Asia and Western Europe; and West Point (Edition Stemmle, 2001), photographs created during a year in residence at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, published for West Point’s bicentennial with an introduction by James Salter. Lippman has been the recipient of two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work can be found in the collections of public and private institutions worldwide, and has been exhibited regularly throughout the United States since 1985.
Marcia Lippman lives and works in New York.