Karen is a Gen-X native metro Detroiter who merges documentary and lifestyle photography to tell a compelling narrative of people and place.  Growing up during the rise and fall of the Industrial North in and around Detroit has afforded her an intimate understanding of this unique chapter in the American narrative.  Witnessing this transformation has inspired her to explore pivotal questions of what it means to aspire to and achieve the American Dream in the modern day Promised Land. 

Specifically, Karen is interested in the idea of work.  The daughter of a 34-year UAW auto worker and daughter-in-law of a non-union foundry worker, she explores structural and intimate choices  people make resulting from long-standing barriers of race, class, gender, and the forces of societal and political change.

Karen loves people. Connecting. Sharing. Being in the world.  She aims to make seemingly ordinary moments extraordinary through the lens.  As a photographer, she enters lives, sometimes for only a fleeting moment, and slips away without her presence being known. Other times, she is a deliberate, persistent presence in someone's personal space.  She takes something from every person she photographs.  She tries to give something in return.  It is her hope that every photograph that comes through her creates empathy and agency for people she experiences in the world.  This is why Karen photographs.

Karen aims to own little. She travels anywhere and everywhere — full gear in tow — in a single daypack. Her philosophy is travel light, try strange foods, and make friends along the way. Times of freedom and adventure — not safety and comfort — have been the happiest of her life.

Karen holds a B.A. in History from the University of Michigan with coursework at the Université Paris I - Sorbonne.  She is a self-taught photographer and writer and currently lives with her husband and son outside of Ann Arbor.

“Photographs are a window into our collective soul. Affirmation. Reformation. Confirmation. The single most powerful means of communication.  A universal language.  A single photograph unites, divides, changes, and ultimately binds us together in the shared human experience.”

KAREN LIPPOWITHS