Gregory Halpern

• Mack Books 2024
  
• Hardback, 1st edition, 112p
  
• New

Over two decades, Gregory Halpern has been photographing in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, meticulously crafting the series of photographs that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave is an idiosyncratic vision of a city amidst its contradictions, defying familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality verging on surrealism. Halpern’s mesmerising sequence unfurls as a stage across which distinct and unpredictable characters appear in and amongst solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence. 
 
The images often locate their subjects within the specificities of the season and balance a historical project with the immediacy of a moment in its individual radiance. Embracing themes of reversal and ascension, Halpern confronts the complexities of his birthplace and of contemporary America at large, seeing beauty intertwined with ugliness and redemption with despair. This lyrical new work is testament to the endless complexity of a place at once familiar and unknown.

Signed by Gregory Halpern on press.  

• Aperture 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history. 

Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling portrait of Guadeloupe and its inhabits, focusing on local histories and experiences.  Let the Sun Beheaded Be commingles life and death, nature and culture, and beauty and decay in enigmatic color images of the archipelago’s residents and lush landscape, as well as monuments related to the brutality of its past.

The project is part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

• Mack 2016
  
• Hardback, 4th printing
  
• NEW
  

[…] traditional American landscape photography has become a rather moribund photographic trope [...] a sanctified, cliched reverence has become the norm. In Halpern’s California work, I see him removing himself from the comforts of the past and endeavoring to strike out afresh, rethinking his conditioning and antecedents to break free of this particular mould.
— Chris Killip

Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.
— Robert Adams

The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row—but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.

The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny.

The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera, but he has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction or fantasy—a structure, sequence and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.

4th edition/printing.  With a signed plate pasted into the endpapers - see photo.

• Mack 2017
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Used: near fine
  

[…] traditional American landscape photography has become a rather moribund photographic trope [...] a sanctified, cliched reverence has become the norm. In Halpern’s California work, I see him removing himself from the comforts of the past and endeavoring to strike out afresh, rethinking his conditioning and antecedents to break free of this particular mould.
— Chris Killip

Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.
— Robert Adams

The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row—but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.

The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny.

The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera, but he has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction or fantasy—a structure, sequence and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.

Signed copy.  1st edition/1st printing.   

Some light marking to cover, inside very fine.