From Emmanuelle Lequeux’s article for Le Monde:
For thirty years, Ken Graves and Eva Lipman have surveyed together the meeting places and entertainment in the United States. After the death of the first, in 2016, his companion immersed himself in their archives in order to design the book “Restraint and Desire”.
Two beings, one look. In their images, Ken Graves and Eva Lipman managed to become one. For thirty years, the couple has put their dual gaze on the world: from their meeting, in 1985, to the death of Ken Graves, in 2016, the two accomplices have surveyed galas and matches, military ceremonies and strip clubs. All of these micro-events which, Ken Graves thought, “embodied America’s innocence, its ability to play and go wild, its insatiable appetite for fun” . Immersed for five years in their archives (many of them unpublished), Eva Lipman has released an astonishing batch of images. Thus was born Restraint and Desire, published by TBW editions.
Before meeting, both practiced photography alone. She as an amateur, he more as a professional. At the end of the 1960s, this native of Oregon left the ranks of the Navy. He is not 30 years old, he is “at war with himself” . Street photographer quick to flush out the incongruous in the most common situations, Ken Graves then launches into the image. He loved “jazz and basketball”, remembers today the one who sees him tirelessly traveling “to provincial festivals, leisure parks, canine beauty contests, automobile or aviation fairs, to document slices of everyday American life”
See the exhibition “Restraint + Desire” at ClampArt
Browse all of Ken Graves and Eva Lipman’s work at ClampArt