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.
