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.

“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.”
- Brad Feuerhelm