Gregory Halpern
"Photographers have a way of organizing/simplifying the chaos that is the world around us. And it is said that photography is uniquely suited to ‘reflect’ the world around us, but what if our surroundings are complex to the point of being visually and verbally indescribable? That conundrum is the reality I want to reflect, with the creation of a rightfully impenetrable thing."
- Gregory Halpern
Gregory Halpern was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1977. He is known for a distinctive style of documentary photography that is rooted in both the real and the sublime. This approach has led him to photograph, among other things, life in post-industrial towns of the American Rust Belt, the people and places of Los Angeles, and the uniquely unifying experience of a total solar eclipse. Of his practice, he says, “What’s interesting to me about the world is its chaos and contradictions, the way opposites can be so beautiful in relation to each other.”
Though Halpern says he is primarily motivated by the desire to “create” rather than “document,” his work is powerfully affecting in its reflection of the world around us. A study of working conditions for service employees at Harvard, created while he was a student there, resulted in a successful bid for a living wage and was published as a book, Harvard Works Because We Do (2003). ZZYZX, his fantastical book of photographs of Los Angeles published by MACK in 2016, is now in its fourth edition. King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK in 2024, brings together two decades of work from his hometown of Buffalo.
Halpern became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2018, an associate member two years later, and a full member in 2023. He has published eight monographs, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his photographs are in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He teaches photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
