Sipprell's father died before her birth on Halloween, 1885, in Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada. In 1895, she and her mother moved from Canada to Buffalo, New York, where several of her five older brothers had established themselves. She was introduced to photography in the portrait studio of her brother Francis James Sipprell, where she later worked as an assistant and ultimately became a partner in the business (1905-1915).

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In the early 1900s, Buffalo was a center of the aesthetics movement called pictorialism, which sought to create photographs that were as artful as paintings; often their images were characterized by a dreamy quality and soft focus.

Sipprell became one of the foremost practitioners of pictorial photography in the United States. She produced autochromes (color) and platinum, bromoil, gum, and carbon prints; won awards in exhibitions; and had her work published in magazines in the United States and Europe.

As a portrait photographer, Sipprell sought to convey a sense of the whole person and what made each unique. She also photographed landscapes, still lifes, female nudes, major individuals in the arts and government, and people in countries in which she traveled, including Yugoslavia, Italy, Russia, Mexico, and Sweden.

In 1915, Sipprell, then thirty, moved to New York City with Jessica E. Beers, with whom she lived until 1923. She opened a photographic studio in Greenwich Village and eventually became a contract photographer for the Ethical Culture School, where Beers was a principal.

A Russian immigrant, Irina Khrabroff, was first her student and later her traveling companion, close friend, and business manager. As a student, Khrabroff spent her winters living with Sipprell and Beers in New York City. In 1923, when Khrabroff married, Beers moved out of the apartment, but Sipprell continued living there with Khrabroff and her husband until 1933.

Around 1937, Phyllis Fenner (1899-1982)--a writer, librarian, and anthologist of children's books--became Sipprell's housemate and traveling companion. This relationship continued through the final thirty-eight years of Sipprell's life. In the mid-1960s, they had Harold Olmstead build them a house in Manchester, Vermont.

Clara Sipprell died in April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. Her ashes are buried in a plot near an outcropping of rock in Manchester. Attached to the rock is a small bronze tablet on which, in accordance with her wishes, are engraved her own name along with the names of Jessica Beers and Phyllis Fenner.

It is not clear whether or not Sipprell's relationships were sexual or even romantic, yet their length and stability, and the evidence of the memorial marker, indicate an extraordinary level of commitment.

American lesbian art in the earlier twentieth century was indelibly shaped by the expatriate experience and by the emergence of a more democratic art form, photography, as well as by the intense pressure following World War II to retreat into the closet.

The most significant examples of pre-Stonewall lesbian photography convey relationships, reflect lesbian iconography, or show the photographer looking at and recording her beloved.

While nude depictions of women appear in most cultures, on both sides of the equator, and in rich variety, lesbian artists have been particularly resourceful in their use of the female nude.