Mack 隆重推出备受期待的美国著名摄影师、玛格南图片社成员格雷戈里·哈尔彭的第三部专著《国王、王后、恶棍》。.
One of today’s most creative documentary photographers, the Buffalo, NY-born Halpern creates thought-provoking output that poetically explores the complexities of contemporary American identity. His second monograph, released in 2016—the captivating, enigmatic, and at times, otherworldly visual ode to Los Angeles, ZZYZX—was a landmark success, and is now in its fourth edition.
The title borrows the traditional name for a deck’s face card, though perhaps more importantly, it echoes Vladimir Nabokov’s dark 1928 tragicomedy, which centers on an intricate, deceitful love triangle driven by characters playing false parts. For Halpern, this reference serves as a fitting framework for Buffalo, a metaphor for the slippery nature of identity and the conflicting, coexisting versions of ourselves we carry within.
Captured over the course of two decades, his images defy the standard, familiar tropes of Rust Belt decline, instead leaning heavily into an idiosyncratic, enigmatic strain of reality that constantly edges toward the surreal. Here, Halpen positions himself as a guide—or perhaps, much like Nabokov’s own characters, an unreliable narrator—through his childhood home.
Halpern utilises heavy symbolism and a quiet, domestic tension to drive the narrative. Simple objects and everyday scenes—a single playing card left on a car seat, a frozen chessboard, or tulips stubbornly blooming through a sudden spring snow—carry an unexpected psychological weight that holds the gaze and provokes the imagination. Games and their inherent power dynamics recur constantly, from the raw friction of a boy boxing to the quiet stalemate of winter, presenting a world of “confused” seasons where beauty is inextricably intertwined with ugliness, and industrial decay coexists with nature.
A number of the images in the book portray the area’s residents, captured during chance encounters in the eerie silence of Buffalo’s snowstorms. Halpern approaches his subjects without imposing a rigid narrative or evoking simple pity, allowing viewers to draw their own interpretations of these characters and their internal lives.
Poetic and absorbing, the local architecture and desolate corners appear isolated yet strangely monumental, shifting from a muted, sunless palette of winter whites to sudden, radiant bursts of summer warmth. Yet, amid this underlying sense of despair, Halpern’s masterful manipulation of composition and light renders each image undeniably beautiful, creating a powerful contrast that mirrors the city’s endless complexity.
As we’ve come to expect from Halpern, King, Queen, Knave transcends mere documentation, operating in a shifting state of dream and memory that feels intensely more personal than the sun-drenched, hallucinatory journey of ZZYZX. Back amidst the deeply etched terrain of his home, Halpern confronts the ghosts of a shared past using the camera not just for insular self-reflection, but to capture a broader, collective nostalgia. “When you look at a person, all of these forms of being are there inside of us,” he observes, a sentiment that feels profoundly resonant here, where the faces on the street inevitably mirror younger, alternate versions of his own history.
所有图片 © 格雷戈里·哈尔彭. Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
King, Queen, Knave is published by Mack and is available via their 网站.