Gregory Halpern’s photobook King, Queen, Knave has been nineteen years in the making. The first images for the photobook were shot while Halpern was a student in the MFA program at California College of the Arts, where he studied under his mentor, the photographer Larry Sultan. At the time, Halpern felt lost and adrift, unsure of his direction. Working in California, he struggled with a sense of purpose, of where he was going as a photographer, a sentiment familiar to most MFA students. “I had nothing to say,” he recalled at the time. “I had no idea what to do.” His solution was to return to Buffalo during his winter break and photograph his hometown every day for six weeks. The choice to return to Buffalo was based on a student gamble, driven by the belief that to do so would help him regain his sight. That initial period of self-doubt became an opportunity to renew his vision and recalibrate his focus. Nineteen years have passed since those first images were taken. King, Queen, Knave is the product of that first encounter, carried forward for over two decades.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
Halpern has had a solid run of late. He first gained international recognition with his photobook ZZYZX (MACK, 2016), a hallucinatory portrait of the city of Los Angeles shot between 2008 and 2014. This followed smaller photobooks like East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Études Books, 2014), a collaboration with his partner, Ahndraya Parlato, and A (J&L Books, 2011). His later works, including Confederate Moons (TBW Books, 2018), Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2019), and Let the Sun Beheaded Be (Magnum, 2020), further cemented his reputation. Let the Sun Beheaded Be was based on an extended stay in the Caribbean archipelago of Guadalupe. The photobook featured an essay by historian and curator, Clément Chéroux, and an interview with his friend and colleague, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. A selection of images was arranged for the exhibition, Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan (September 29, 2023 – January 08, 2024) at the International Center for Photography.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
The portraits in King, Queen, Knave continue Halpern’s working-class approach, a thread that has run through his work since his time as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he studied under documentary photographer Chris Killip. At Harvard, Halpern produced Harvard Works Because We Do (Quantuck Lane Press, 2003), a political book advocating for a living wage for the university’s service workers. Between 1994 and 2001, Harvard’s endowment tripled, while the university outsourced service jobs to lower-paying companies, resulting in significant wage cuts for custodians, food workers, and security guards. Halpern’s portraits of Harvard’s service workers are direct and front-facing, accompanied by brief excerpts of their oral testimony of working at the university, juggling multiple jobs and family commitments. The individuals look straight into the camera, addressing the photographer directly. This approach mirrors the urgency of their political demands as if they are saying: “This is my life, this is my story — listen to our demands.”
Gregory Halpern, from Harvard Works Because We Do (Quantuck Lane Press, 2003)
Gregory Halpern, from Harvard Works Because We Do (Quantuck Lane Press, 2003)
Gregory Halpern, from Harvard Works Because We Do (Quantuck Lane Press, 2003)
The book included a forward by the renowned working-class historian, Studs Terkel, who praised the student-led sit-in at the Harvard administration building, which sparked the reversal of Harvard’s wage practices:
It was a motley group of these kids—who in their sit-in at the Harvard administration building set off a bonfire for equity and justice. It was the testimonies—distributed as photocopies, read at rallies, and now printed in this book—that had inspired them…
For the students who sat-in, the odds were overwhelmingly against them. Yet something remarkable and wholly unexpected happened. Other students, who might otherwise have been interested only in making it postgraduately big, gathered around. Faculty members, who might not have taught Ethics 101 but did practice it, joined the young sitters-in in protest.
The administration, which until this moment said “Never”—the president had vowed to resign rather than negotiate—finally bowed, and considerable concessions were won.
Although Halpern eventually moved away from documenting worker testimony, this early work established his focus on the stories of those marginalized and forgotten. His photographic approach remains rooted in a “photography from below,” focusing on the experiences of those overlooked and discarded by society, but those who ultimately make it run and work.
A key influence in this early work through to his project in Buffalo was Milton Rogovin’s Triptychs: Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited (W.W. Norton, 1994). Rogovin lived and worked close to where Halpern grew up, documenting the same people on Buffalo’s Lower West Side over twenty-five years. When Halpern first discovered the book as a teenager, it shook him to his core. Rogovin photographed the same people over decades, documenting the changes in family composition, such as the expansion and contraction of family members and relationships. A father and son appear together in one early portrait, while the father is absent in a later portrait. The reason for this absence is unclear — he may have passed away or simply not been there when Rogovin visited. The juxtaposition of newer and older generations emphasizes a link between past and present, implying a continuity that points to larger themes of rebirth and renewal.
Milton Rogovin, Triptychs, Buffalo’s Lower West Side Revisited, (W.W. Norton, 1994)
Similar to Halpern’s portraits found in Harvard Works Because We Do, Rogovin’s portraits are deliberately undramatic — stripped down and de-sensationalized. In their composition and framing, they recall the anti-illusionary photographic work of August Sander and Evelyn Hofer, marked by front-facing unity and simplicity. Rogovin’s images show children who later reappear as grown adults, and grown adults who eventually become grandparents. As the triptychs move through time and across generations, the resilience of these figures on the streets and in the interiors of Buffalo’s Lower West Side is as striking as their eventual absence. Rogovin’s Triptychs bears witness to photography’s disquieting relationship with loss and life, death and survival, reminding us that what is lost is inseparably tied to what survives and that what is remembered is also what is mourned in the present, kept alive in the act of remembrance.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
As an extension, Halpern’s work for King, Queen, Knave underscores the value of returning to a place you know, establishing connections with the people and spaces that shape it. By revisiting familiar faces and locations over time, Halpern recalibrates his perspective, allowing him to see anew while maintaining an ongoing relationship with the community in which he grew up. This process is not about passing through, but rather about embedding himself in the rhythm of a place and its people, engaging with its evolving image and story. Everyone knows that strange feeling of visiting a building or street corner you’re intimately familiar with but haven’t seen in a few years, only to no longer recognize it, or recognize it solely by what remains seemingly untouched. Approaching these buildings or street corners requires adjusting your vision to see what has always been there but may have changed hands or shifted in meaning or significance. Photography has a special congress with this feeling.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
King, Queen, Knave was not the first documented instance of the photographer’s return to the city where he grew up. This act of return was also enacted by his brother, the pulitzer-prize winning writer Jake Halpern, for his long-form article, “The Big Business of Scavenging in Postindustrial America,” published in the New York Times Magazine on the metal salvage industry. Greg accompanied his brother Jake on these trips, taking photographs of small and large-scale salvagers and the machines that make the industry whir and tick. Some of Greg’s outtakes, like the smouldering metal embers not included in the NYT’s profile, made it into King, Queen Knave.
Gregory Halpern, Photos for “The Big Business of Scavenging in Postindustrial America,” (New York Times Magazine, 2019)
Gregory Halpern, Photos for “The Big Business of Scavenging in Postindustrial America,” (New York Times Magazine, 2019)
Jake profiles small and large-scale salvagers. From Adrian Paisley, a 42 year-old man, who trawls through the streets of Buffalo and its outlying suburbs for scrap metal, to the larger salvagers, like Todd Levin of Niagara Metals, who took him to the former site of Bethlehem Steel, where the mills had long been scrapped but remnants known as “buttons” — massive metal boulders weighing up to 20 tons — could still be found. These buttons were formed when molten slag from iron ore was dumped onto Lake Erie’s shoreline, and Levin worked to salvage them. One of the great passages from Jake’s article describes the moment when he visits this former industrial shoreline, looking upon these metal buttons in the context of the city’s deindustrialization, and how the metal salvage industry is taking apart the city bit-by-bit to remake it anew. “The city has survived,” Jake writes, “in part, by devouring itself.”
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
This sense of a city remaking itself from the embers of the old is conveyed in the pages of King, Queen, Knave. Halpern has conjured a “last of humanity” feeling reminiscent of the work of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). Like McCarthy’s prose, Halpern’s syntax is spare, emptied-out, fragmentary, skeletal. The Road is about a father and son travelling through a post-apocalyptic world, struggling to survive in a landscape ravaged by some unknown catastrophe. The book is populated by dangers both natural and human. McCarthy’s father and son are surviving on whatever they can get their hands on, but they are also searching for meaning in a world depleted of nearly everything. To convey this feeling, McCarthy’s sentences are often raw and bare, stripped of unnecessary detail, avoiding excess, and omitting quotation marks for dialogue. This pared-back style heightens the bleakness of the narrative and its environment. The repetition of certain phrases and the invocation of elemental imagery — fire, ash, light, and darkness — lend the text an almost mythic quality.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
The opening pages of Halpern’s photobook summons this feeling. Halpern pictures a makeshift shelter with rags draped over bare branches, a fire flickering in the foreground, and a house encased in icicles. A tear in the fabric of a chain-link fence and footprints in the snow hints at a furtive escape, while a dynamically framed, Henri Cartier-Bresson-like figure navigates a city park. This is Buffalo frozen over what seems like a thousand winters — a place where every house appears on the verge of collapse, teetering and rickety, a city hollowed out and left in ruins, buried beneath endless layers of snow and ice. Amidst the burning embers and crumbling structures, we catch a glimpse of the elusive white deer of the city, who reappears repeatedly in the pages as an eerie apparition.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
Alongside Rogovin and McCarthy, another reference to Halpern’s approach to Buffalo comes from the regional painter Charles Burchfield. Born in 1893 in Ashtabula, Ohio, Burchfield became known for his otherworldly depictions of the American landscape, particularly the industrial and natural environments of Western New York. Burchfield’s House Wreckers in June (1931) prefigures a similarly bleak portrayal of Buffalo’s urban landscape. The painting shows four demolition men taking pry bars to the facade of a gutted house, its structure barely holding on as they dismantle it. In the foreground, a fire smoulders. Burchfield’s palette is dominated by grays and browns, mostly shadows, drained of vibrant colour (except for the fire), reinforcing a sense of chromatic depletion of both environment and world.
Charles Burchfield, House Wreckers in June (1931)
This comparison with Burchfield extends beyond the painter’s gray palette and scenes of ruination. There is also the more mystical Burchfield, where trees and bushes seem to pulse with an eerie light, and the landscape vibrates with an otherworldly afterglow. This is a supernatural Burchfield, where even a muddy swamp radiates with an ethereal luminescence. Similarly, in Halpern’s photographs of Buffalo, the focus does not remain on this image of environmental and social catastrophe. A quarter of the way through the photobook, it takes a U-turn. As the snow melts, this “last of humanity” feeling goes with it — it drifts away, much like the transition in Burchfield’s Retreat of Winter (1950 – 1964), where dirty brown tones give way to a pulsing, glowing landscape of electric turquoise and canary yellow.
Charles Burchfield, Retreat of Winter, (1950 – 1964)
When Spring arrives in King, Queen, Knave, images of the city’s crumbling, tilting and smouldering architecture are exchanged with portraits of the city’s residents. The photographs include a solitary figure picking poppies in the shadow of an industrial plant, a football player streaked with mud from the field, and the wild emanation of poppies flourishing outside an industrial facility. These matter-of-fact images are placed alongside more strange and otherworldly Burchfield-like photographs of the night sky and the city’s white deer. These images align Halpern with a weirder strand of the documentary tradition, connecting his work to a frequently overlooked aspect of American art that draws on a Magic Realist sensibility.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
In the previous century, American art in Burchfield’s mode had intermittently harboured traces of the unreal and otherworldly. In the winter of 1943, Alfred H. Barr, then director of the Museum of Modern Art, used the term “Magic Realism” to describe painters who combined a realistic technique with improbable, dreamlike visions. Within this context, art historian Angela Miller has argued that the turn to Magic Realism and other unworldly images in the 1940s represented a response to the crisis of subjectivity brought on by war and fascism after social realist forms became vulnerable to fascist manipulation. Miller emphasizes, however, that the turn to Magic Realism of the 1940s should not be mistaken for an American flavour of Surrealism. Artists of that generation evoke a strange reality, not a surreality. Similarly, photographers like Halpern avoid formulaic approaches to the unconscious and instead seek to reclaim an eerie strangeness and weirdness found in everyday life.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
Aside from King, Queen, Knave, perhaps the clearest example of this otherworldly vision within the context of a looming fascism comes from Halpern’s short photobook, Confederate Moons (2017), a work that was conceived after the Presidential election of Donald J. Trump, during the height of political tension and right-wing populism in America. The photobook was completed nine days after the Unite the Right rally took place in Charlottesville, VA, where white nationalists marched through the city streets with tiki-torches in response to the planned removal of the city’s confederate monuments. During a counter-protest on April 12th, thirty-five protesters were injured, and a woman was killed when a motorist drove through a crowd. Days after these events, a total solar eclipse extinguished the sun. While photographing in the streets of North and South Carolina, Halpern was struck by how the country felt as though it was being “ripped apart” all while the entire continent was staring at the sun with “apocalyptic thrill,” bewildered by the rare natural fact of the moon having eclipsed the sun.
Gregory Halpern, from Confederate Moons, (TBW Books, 2017)
Gregory Halpern, from Confederate Moons, (TBW Books, 2017)
Gregory Halpern, from Confederate Moons, (TBW Books, 2017)
In this context of peculiar wonder and natural awe, political tension and social upheaval, Halpern turned to the image of a single hand raised skyward to block out the sun. In the photobook, Halpern paired this subtle gesture with a photograph of a lunar eclipse, where the once-blue sky turns eerily black, and the blinding white sun is reduced to a dark orange blot. With the moon picture blocking out the sun, we can imagine the ground going silent, the air being sucked out of the image as if the whole world was holding its breath. Seconds later, Halpern pictures the sun and moon through a long exposure. The exposure produces a strange effect: we see the world doubled — two suns and two moons in an eerie and unsettling reflection. Halpern has described the process of making Confederate Moons as a search for a photographic form that was otherworldly in its mode, eerie in its tone. A language similar to the strange spatial and psychological dislocations found in the genre of Magic Realism where the sudden shift in perspective suggests a displacement in one’s own perception of the world. The change in perspective was akin to the shift in barometric temperature one feels with a coming storm. Alter the perspective, alter the mood.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
This exploration of the otherworldly continues in King, Queen, Knave, particularly in its closing sequence, where Halpern tilts his camera skyward. The images shift from an indoor scene of a starry night sky and galaxy found in a common office building, to a flock of ravens soaring through a grove of trees, photographed in motion by the camera’s flash. Instead of bringing clarity, the flash freezes the birds’ movement, creating an elusive, almost spectral vision.
Gregory Halpern, from King, Queen, Knave (MACK, 2024). Courtesy of MACK and the artist.
The presence of the birds is like the eerie in Mark Fisher’s study The Weird and the Eerie (2017). It resembles something excessive and unexpected. “The weird,” Fisher writes, “is constituted by a presence of that which does not belong. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.” Within the context of aesthetic theory, the eerie and the weird function as stylistic modes, undermining previous aesthetic categories and open up a space for a new framing of everyday experience. In the discourse of documentary photography, it moves at the edges of the genre, throwing a wrench into the distinctions between what appears as real and habitual, and what is constructed or imagined.
Halpern’s long-term commitment to documenting Buffalo contrasts with his focus on these brief, transient moments, where the everyday is infused with a subtle sense of the weird and the eerie. The otherworldly here isn’t overt but emerges through its disorienting framing. The ravens, pictured mid-flight, appear both ever-present and ghostly, while the red galaxy mirrors the vastness of the sky outside but is an image of a common office building ceiling. The elusive white deer of Buffalo is that miraculous anomaly in the field of vision. Its weirdness, to cite Fisher again, is the emergence of that which doesn’t belong, aligning with Halpern’s preference for photographing the strangeness of everyday life, where even the most mundane scenes hold the potential for a moment of otherworldly revelation.