In his radical reassembly of photographic imagery, Matt Lipps (born in northern California in 1975) exploits the inherent possibilities of appropriation to generate new meanings and relationships.His 2008 series Home affixed contoured cut-outs of Ansel Adam’s pristine, monumental landscapes to cardboard backing and propped them on a tabletop in front of a background composed out of multi-toned photographs of the artist’s childhood home. By placing certain landscape formations next to certain rooms, Lipps creates ‘portraits through landscape’ of several family members, including himself. Born and still living in California, Lipps recognizes that he lives in “the capital of that image producing media industry (Hollywood)”.

Lipps’s current body of work, ‘Library’ (2013–14), continues his interest in the disruption of the archival. The series began with the discovery on an out-of-print publication, in this case a 17 volume TimeLife series titled ‘The Library of Photography’ (1970–85). Lipps’s interest lies in the systematicity the series applied to the photographic act and, by extension, to the photograph itself.