It has taken me a few weeks to elucidate my feelings in reviewing Gregory’s new book King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK this past month. I had previously seen some photographs in a workshop we facilitated in Athens with Gregory, Raymond Meeks, Adrianna Ault, and Tim Carpenter. I remember the images well, though I am pretty sure not all of them made it into the book. One image was made in the book and has remained with me. Along with Chris Killip’s photograph of Simon being taken to sea for the first time since his father drowned in 1983, it is an image that I will carry with me for a long time.
I suggest that pictures like this burn themselves into my retina, then sear their impression on my mind semi-permanently. It happens infrequently, given the number of images I look at per hour, day, year, and lifetime. These images belong to what I consider my memory museum. You can find other pictures in this museum by Laurenz Berges, Nan Goldin, Jeffrey Silverthorne, and Martina Hoogland Ivanow, among others. They are single images with which I feel an excessive affinity, and I find it hard to explain the pathos involved in these choices. I sometimes think the images chose me more than the other way around. Perhaps they are personal icons, no matter how unsure of the term icon I am.
I cannot explain how the memory museum is put together, but I suggest that it is deeply personal and that when I see its images, it jars something loose in my psychological register. These images make me feel more than all other images make me feel. They feel natural, as if I can imagine them as lived experiences or memories I could have had in a lucid dream. They are pieces of my condition, and though I did not produce them, they haunt me. Gregory’s photograph that he showed us at that workshop features a young man, held upright by the crutches extending his arms, his delicate foot un-shoed and limply scratching a hole into the earth with his big toe, poised like a de-commissioned ballerina. He is dressed in clothes, a type of the not now. They are incongruent to 2024 but look as if they could be from the 70s, adding, along with the graveyard behind him, something like a missing still frame from Sometimes They Come Back, but staged in the 70s, not the 1950s. The scene is very yellow. Glowingly yellow. This photograph haunts my museum.
The graveyard background is slightly out of focus. It reminds the viewer of pictorialist photographers and cinematographers at the turn of the Twentieth Century who used grease on their lenses to give the sensation of an out-of-focus dream. In the case of Gregory’s lens work, the effect is contained in the background, an element that the artist has described as deriving from an old lens with minute imperfections. It appears in other photographs as well. The effect is supernatural. This is the word I have been searching for to describe what happens in Gregory’s Buffalo, amongst the taciturn de-industrialized landscape, with its frozen homes, its ice castles swaying, being pulled to the side by the elements, and gravity itself.
In the book, it is not all cold and barren; the summer is equally feverish. Sweat clings to bodies, and Madonnas lie in frame, waiting to be photographed for continuity and permanence. There is something supernatural about the images in the book. Halpern’s work is generally associated with magical realism within the documentary tradition, and what separates that from the idea of the supernatural is thin. Magical realism exists in a state of plausibility, of realism, however off-piste or rarified. With the supernatural claim, I suggest the same familiarity, but instead of realism, I project a thin state between the natural and spiritual onto them. Not all of the images in the book contain this, which suggests that it exists between these two states. Whereas I would have thought of his previous work as indebted to magical realism, this work comes from another dimension that favors the ether.
Other elements that make the book supernatural, apart from the lens the artist uses, are the appearance, several times throughout, of spirit animals, and that animal is predominantly a white deer. However, others, like an owl, also feel like significant choices. Though I am tempted to investigate the history of the white deer and its mythology, perhaps even its indigenous symbolic interpretation, I pause. Part of the knowing of the unknowing I feel in the work, the supernatural, is that I should understand the phantasmagoric elements within the book as elusive. To pin each of the supernatural elements to a board like an inert butterfly would spoil their appearance. Noting them is enough. I want to leave my hand in the dream, not deactivate it. And my hand, or the hands of others, pushes through the angels of our better nature outlined in pencil on a swinging door that has seen better days, the door, a thin membrane between the world as described and the world as it might’ve been.
It would be remiss of me not to point out the winter hours in the book, though they do not dominate any more than the other three seasons. They bear a heavier weight. People within the frames deal with its difficulties and its inhospitable nature. They agitate against its winds, slide through its muck and intemperance. It, like the deer, continues the use of white color throughout the book. This book also feels quite close to cinema, a reference I made with the boy, clothed out of time, shoe off, and prodding, like a ballerina, the floor beneath his feet on point, effete. The white of the movie here is a constant throughout the book. It undergirds the sequence even when it switches to warmer months. This presents a flashback as if winter were the constant, but the dream allows for more hospitable memories of the warmer months, though spring and fall are lodged between the two. The summer months present the most realistic bulwark against the two. With all its superstition, autumn shares the stage with winter in the most profound sense. The home fires begin, chimneys are racked with choking smoke, the leaves start transforming, and the whole world feels like it could illustrate a Cure song.
Board games and chance. My analysis of the work includes a comment on using the two board games that appear as a manifestation in the sequence. One board is covered in snow and is perhaps a form of checkers left outdoors on a porch to gather an incoming snow drift, the game frozen like a photograph during play. There is an image later in the book of a carton of eggs broken on the sidewalk, and I am reminded of the checkerboard, though, in my amnesia, I am not sure why they relate. Perhaps chance is a factor in both. What are? What are the? What are the chances? The other game of dominoes on a hot summer day begins to take on a sprawling form that precedes an ancient symbolic order that was re-purposed for the emblem of lunacy in the mid-twentieth century. The Hakenkreuz is a symbol parlayed from a Navajo symbol for healing and a symbol of good fortune from Mesopotamia. Here, it is probably just a game…maybe. What are the odds? Later on in the book, a man holds two black dice. What are the chances?
The book is perhaps a parable about America itself. A supernatural realm hinted inside the book is magical, fantastic, and supernatural. For a country built on pre-existing indigenous mythologies complicated by their eradication, the world of America is part fiction, part natural. It exists in the vacuum of several creation stories, including the natural world as the catalyst to which all life owes its essence. America is an unreal place. It is a land deeply indebted to its violence, its self-mythology, and its constant state of mixing and change. It is partially this enigma of un-fixity and indebtedness to its frenetic pace that attracts people seeking new possibilities. These elements lead to its suggestions of manifest destiny and its people, like trapped molecules bouncing off one another, attracting and repelling each other.
The noted cultural intellectual Mark Fisher, when speaking about the eeriness found in Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film about disappearing girls around a natural rock formation based on a novel of the same name from 1967 by Joan Lindsay, noted the lack of the story’s closure, the success of the narrative impinged on a type of unknowing…
Above all else, though, the illusion of factuality is produced by the lack of any solution to the mystery. The story about the painters Zeuxius and Parrhasios, referred to by Lacan, offers a parable. Zeuxius painted a bunch of grapes so convincing that birds attempted to eat them. Parrhasios painted a curtain, which Zeuxius asked him to pull aside to reveal what he had painted. The lack of explanation makes Picture at Hanging Rock an analog of Parrhasios’ Painting. It became a veil, an enigma whose very irresolution produced the illusion that something must be behind the curtain. (1)
Illusions and projections produce a schism between what we see and what we want to believe. There is no difference when we consider the essence of a nation or a place. The supernatural aspects of Halpern’s book suggest a world that is part illusion, part dream, and part system of beliefs and desires drawn together in a coarse burlap bag in which the mystery of its true nature remains invisible, undeveloped, and full of potential to be read in innumerable ways. Though the book centers on Buffalo, New York, the place suggests a larger picture of America over the past decade or so.
Its most tremendous success is that it operates between states of believability and credibility and that the photographs themselves feel less and less tethered to any precise effect of the documentary tradition, with which the artist is often aligned. I am reminded of the unique nature of Sergio Larrain’s Two Girls, La Paz, Bolivia, 1957. In this photograph, we find the same sense of the supernatural. The photo reads as realistic, if a bit magical, but the doubling of the girl, the harsh use of supernatural, above the laws of composition and filled with an enigmatic potential. The doubling of the girl presents an uncanny use of the body as it descends the stairs. Hard angles of shadows and light create something close to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
In summary, Halpern’s Buffalo offers something unique. The photographs are couched in a style that feels supernatural in our day and age. Perhaps this synthesis concerns a viewer’s readings of magical realism and supernatural imagery in the wake of AI. There is certainly some crossover in how we are undergoing a mass shift in our perception of photography and reading the images in this book, similar to artists like Torbjørn Rødland. Halpern’s vision has grown into something immutable, daring, and challenging. If he continues down this path, I am curious about what might come of his work and how that will be situated in the medium’s history and the documentary tradition’s history. He is still young enough, and this may develop further. Let’s hope…Highest Recommendation. Do not be a fool. This is an extraordinary book. Get a copy.
(1) Fisher, Mark, The Weird and the Eerie, “The Eeriness Remains”: Joan Lindsay. Pg. 125-126. Repeater Books, 2016