Beauty and its implication of promise is the metaphor that gives art its value. It helps us rediscover some of our best intuitions, the ones that encourage caring.
Robert Adams, in correspondence to Gregory Halpernvia Magnum Photos
Gregory Halpern, Untitled, from the series 'King, Queen, Knave'
Can it be called a return if you’ve never really left? Once described to Aperture Magazine as a place he felt he needed to leave to succeed, Gregory Halpern returns to his hometown of Buffalo to explore identity and place, in his latest body of work, King, Queen, Knave.
Buffalo has long since been a site of inspiration for Halpern, with its old ruins and abandoned spaces calling to his younger self as a place of quiet, and connection for those in between being an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’. The former heart of metal industry and manufacturing, the city has sat emptying, undergoing the familiar decline in the post-industrial era. In conversation with Aperture, Jake Halpern, Gregory’s brother, mused that Buffalo has been an inescapable influence on Gregory: “the surrealness; the hints of the apocalypse; the biblical, wandering characters with their beards” of their hometown finds itself in every new city photographed in the photographer’s search for true essence of Americana and national identity. And now, in Buffalo’s recent renaissance, Halpern retrains his lens on the city, to capture his hometown’s scenes of liveliness, of quiet, of reality, and of the surreal.
Reflecting on portrait photography as a medium, Halpern has been continuously renegotiating the question: ‘What story is mine to tell?’ Working with portraits of strangers, his snapshots never give away a person’s entire history. They mix tight close-ups which abstract the figure, faraway pictures that capture someone in their natural setting, and even animals and objects framed as if seated subjects. His consistent use of the portrait orientation across mixed themes weave his project into a flowing narrative, a space to explore the atmosphere of the town itself as a subject.
Gregory Halpern. Untitled, from the series ‘King, Queen, Knave’
The photographs in King, Queen, Knave create a tender exchange between subject and camera, both reflecting on Halpern’s experience growing up in Buffalo and continuing the questions underscoring his practice: What does America look like? What’s at the heart of this city? Halpern’s photographs work to explore this mystery—the complexities and volatilities of an ever transforming rural townscape—and the unnamed feelings and emotions which know no companion until recognised by someone else’s eyes. And now, after completing a pilgrimage across the Southern Belt and its rural towns, he revisits Buffalo again in search of the stories and emotions that are his to share.
The resulting pictures are an intimate reflection on ‘home’, speaking to the simultaneous decay and revival of his hometown. Images of gutted, rotting houses standing still alongside those still occupied, wildflowers to be picked against a backdrop of forgotten factories, a snow encrusted chess board left behind on the porch proliferate the series. King, Queen, Knave highlights the beauty of Buffalo, challenging the public perception of his hometown fed by the statistics of poverty rates and population decline. A message of pride and a cry for recognition, the portraits of the people and city calls viewers to see the reality of Buffalo, the beauty and hope it still holds to its residents
(By Teddy Woods)