If you happened to attend the 2009 NY Art Book Fair, you might have come across Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook on the table of J&L Books. This early version was rough and unassuming, printed on a laser printer and spiral-bound, its pages made from cheap white paper with small contact prints affixed throughout. The images came from Halpern’s time in Omaha, Nebraska, where he worked in the photography department of a local community college in early 2005. Produced in a limited edition of just 35 copies, only two were sold, and another was traded with photographer Ron Jude.
Gregory Halpern, Omaha Sketchbook, 1st Edition J&L Books (2009)
Over a decade later, when Halpern published Omaha Sketchbook in its expanded form with MACK Books, this provisional quality remained. Now in its second printing, the book still features the same small contact prints that draw you in, requiring you to hold it close to take in all the details. But a notable change distinguishes this later version: while the first iteration used plain white paper, Halpern now introduced polychromatic sheets, either matching or clashing with the palette of his photographs — recalling the faded, sun-stained sheets of childhood.
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
The origins of this shift trace back to an abandoned school, where Halpern discovered a stack of construction paper. In his studio, he set up two tables: one held his contact prints, while the other contained sheets of construction paper. Through trial and error, he treated the contact prints like trading cards, pairing the prints with different sheets of colored paper, photographing the combinations that seemed to resonate and discarding those that did not. In the book’s scans, there’s a material trick at play. Halpern has photographed these pages and the prints with such precision that even the shadows are visible.
Contact prints are often what remains after a work is finished — the residue of the working process, the excess before the final printing. In painting and sculpture, sketchbooks serve as a space for drafting and experimentation, but they are not always preliminary. Photography, unlike drawing, can feel like the furthest thing from sketching. It does not build through iterative marks, nor does it allow for the kind of layering and revision that sketching implies. But what if we take the word seriously? What does it mean to approach photography through the logic of a sketchbook? Perhaps the word implies something provisional, a work in progress — a maquette. A work that can be final, but not necessarily so.
For Halpern, the term “sketchbook” speaks to the elusive nature of photographic work, offering insight into how images come into being — how some are chosen, others abandoned, and some later resurrected. It becomes a way of thinking through materials, of grappling with photography’s tenuous hold on reality, and for providing a means to test out possibilities for reorganizing the chaos of experience into a coherent order. The sketchbook draws us to failures as much as successes, as light leaks, lens flare, blur, overexposure, and underexposure (qualities that might have once been dismissed as flaws), acquire an almost redemptive quality. With the clarifying light of historical distance and shifting criteria, what once seemed like a discarded failure is redeemed through the book’s form and sequencing.
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
When you spend fifteen years working on and off a project, the material you gather inevitably becomes diverse — solitary portraits, fleeting moments like a dog standing in a park or birds in flight at night, alongside stark, unsparing images of young men in juvenile detention. Halpern began making these images in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq, a moment of brute force and violent retribution that aligned with a broader cultural shift toward hypermasculinity in the United States. His work registers a structure of feeling emergent in this era — a nascent experience, lived and felt but not yet fully articulated, whose political effects we are just coming to terms with. As in his earlier and later projects, Halpern’s images center on working-class spaces shaped by labor and confinement — a slaughterhouse, metal refineries, sports fields, and detention centers. In the latter photographs, there’s a feeling of lives interrupted, curtailed before they have fully taken shape.
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
These images are channeled through an atmosphere of aggression, where power is visible in passing gestures, whether in the stance of a teenage boy posturing for the camera, the hardened expressions of young men behind bars, or the messy precision of a slaughterhouse floor. For this work, Halpern revived a technique he has since moved away from: the use of harsh, direct flash. This method saturates the images with a confrontational intensity. The glare of the flash heightens the sense of intrusion, amplifying the violence already present in the subject matter. In some cases, the violence of the image seems to echo the circumstances of those depicted, as if the very texture of the photograph were shaped by the conditions of its making. Violence is not always spectacular. It can be ambient, embedded in the architecture of everyday life: in the glaring fluorescence of a detention hall, the worn-down machinery of a factory floor, the vacant expanse of an empty parking lot at night.
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
The word that comes to mind for Omaha Sketchbook is “maquette”. In The Preparation of the Novel (1980), Roland Barthes describes a work-as-maquette as a form that reveals its own making as it unfolds, staging its own fabrication bit by bit. As a mode of experimentation, it stages this production as a means to facilitate the work’s actual development. Barthes described Marcel Proust’s method as one of marcottage, or layering, in which the text is built through accretion.
Barthes gives the example of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the struggle to write is both the novel’s subject and structure. Within the pages of Proust’s novel, it is as if the maquette were “dissolving,” Barthes writes, “fading into the background to make space for all that it draws in and attracts.” Near the end of the book, Proust realizes that the very hesitations and digressions that delayed his writing are fundamental to the work itself. Although its final form may appear fixed, it remains afflicted by these moments of hesitation and doubt, laying bare the work that goes into writing a novel.
Barthes’s lectures were written while he was attempting to discover a new form of writing, what he titled his Vita Nova, a novel he would never write, as his life was tragically cut short when he was struck by a laundry van in 1980. Unlike Barthes’s unwritten novel, Omaha Sketchbook is more like a finished statement, although it might still look like a work in progress. Nevertheless, it still contains that essential quality of accretion: a composition made through the fragments and leftovers of contact prints, the layering of time and the image, the convergence of one image next to another. Halpern’s photobook is built through this process, photographing in non-sequential parts, cutting, adding, and reordering the fragments to construct meaning between images, all framed by his polychromatic swatches of construction paper. With Omaha Sketchbook, Halpern elevates these leftovers into something else, in a way that echoes Barthes’s understanding of the maquette as a mode of thinking, not simply as a preparatory step but a method of composition that unfolds through revision.
Gregory Halpern, from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK
There is a utopian strand to this act of revision. It rests on the idea that our grasp of reality, as a type of fiction, can be potentially remade or rearranged. The first edition of Omaha Sketchbook is similar to the second, only a little different. Just as a new constellation can be drawn from the same collection of stars, a different photobook can be made from the same grouping of images. While this may seem obvious, perhaps even facile, this aspect of revision is a source of potential. It calls forth a work to come, a work not-yet realized, where everything will be the same, only slightly different.
Halpern’s work is not new in this regard. In philosophy, this speculative proposition appears in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, and is reworked in popular culture as the subject and structuring motif of Ben Lerner’s widely-acclaimed novel, 10:04 (2014). Lerner’s narrator — loosely based on the author himself — projects himself into the future and imagines the book he will write as a recursive fiction, a work-as-maquette that loops back through earlier drafts, previous short stories, actual encounters, and made-up correspondences, staging a speculative transformation of what has already happened. One of the lessons of 10:04 is that we live by fictions — fictions that are precarious and unstable, open to revision. These fictions have effects in the real world. Although it operates through a different medium, Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook takes up this proposition more broadly as a reminder that reality is up for grabs — open to reorganization and redescription, attuned to the flickering possibilities that can emerge from even the slightest shift in perspective.
This glimmer of possibility is immediately apparent in the cover of Omaha Sketchbook, which presents a blank sheet of colored paper, marked by the faint stain of a missing contact print. This absence contains a residual trace of what the book itself is dedicated to, a direct imprint of the photographic process — of construction paper re-mobilized as light-sensitive paper, once pressed against a contact print, exposed, developed, and now removed. What remains is a blank afterimage, a physical record of an image once fixed but now lost. The cover gestures to the speculative operations of photographic work, leaving open the image to come, an image not-yet realized, an image not-yet made.
Gregory Halpern, Cover from Omaha Sketchbook (MACK, 2025). Courtesy the artist and MACK