King, Queen, Knave
Gregory Halpern
Mack
First edition, second printing
Embossed linen hardcover with tipped in image
24 x 29 cm, 112 pages
ISBN 978-1-913620-74-5
September 2024
$70
Gregory’s work stands up among the strongest in contemporary photography. This project is filled to the brim with beautiful and human moments, full of lovely color tonality. We recommend this title finds a home on every photography-lover’s shelf.
From Mack: 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.
