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.
According to David Solo writing in The PhotoBook Review, the book "offers a single, tightly integrated meditation on narcissism and its effects on relationships."
[16] 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).
[16] For about 20 years she has been visiting and photographing a tiny community in Grapevine Hollow in the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia, eastern United States.
"[4] Izabela Radwanska Zhang wrote in the British Journal of Photography that it "challenges our belief in images labelled 'photojournalism', by interweaving a theatrical element.