King, Queen, Knave – an interview with Gregory Halpern
Gregory Halpern is an American photographer, born in Buffalo, New York. In 2014, Halpern was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His publication ZZYZX was awarded Photobook of the Year at the Paris Photo in 2016. King, Queen, Knave is his latest title published by MACK and came out in September last year. Lucy Rogers met Gregory during his show at Huxley Parlour last November, prompting this conversation over email.
Lucy Rogers: King, Queen, Knave sees you return to your hometown in Buffalo, New York. Never nostalgic, the work feels firmly grounded within the present; whereby the past – marked by urban decline – seems to seep through in the background but does not define it as a place. What do you see as the challenges and possibilities of working with a subject which is so familiar? Had you always intended to ‘return’ to Buffalo?
Gregory Halpern: I started photographing in Buffalo twenty years ago, when I first started taking photography seriously. Since then, it’s always been in the background; a place I’d come back to many times a year, almost always with my camera. I live in the region still, about an hour away, and over those years I added pictures here and there from the area. It’s both easier and harder to make work at home. I know places and people, and some insider secrets, but the eyes also get dulled to it over time. An ‘outsider’ sometimes comes in with fresh eyes and shows you something in a new way, or simply shows you something you’d forgotten was there. To be part insider, part outsider, is sometimes the ideal position to be in as a photographer. But Buffalo is also a place that has defined me. There’s a modesty to the place and a proud working-class sensibility that I respect and am proud to be a part of. And over time, the landscape, the colors and the light, feel, for both good and bad, somehow internal.
LR: You’ve been gathering material for King, Queen, Knave for almost two decades. Long term projects feel increasingly rare – especially as the long duration goes against the pressure felt by many photographers to produce. I’m interested in the impact of time on the project, how has it changed and evolved while working across such an extended period?
GH: It’s a huge challenge, trying to wean a project like that down to a manageable amount of images. But increasingly I’m convinced that less is more with photography books. I need other people’s eyes to help me, and I need time to edit. The more time between when I made the picture and when I look at it, the better—the less attached I am to it, less I remember the moment, the feeling, the creative intentions, and the easier it is to see it, and to judge whether it works as an image, divorced from my intentions. It also helps to go slow, to take the pressure off. Prior to this I make a book in Guedeloupe, in the French Caribbean, as part of a commission. I felt very lucky to get the commission, but it felt rushed, to go somewhere where I was truly an outsider, and make a book and an exhibition in a year. After that experience I knew I wanted to focus all my attention on this project, and to work close to home in a more intensive way for a few years.
The more time between when I made the picture and when I look at it, the better—the less attached I am to it, less I remember the moment, the feeling, the creative intentions, and the easier it is to see it, and to judge whether it works as an image, divorced from my intentions.
LR: The exhibition (at Huxley-Parlour) and the book feel quite different. The exhibition places your images in new arrangements and groupings through which to elicit new narrative connections and meanings. It feels like a short story within a wider and more complex narrative arc. How do you approach narrative structure and sequencing across different formats? And what do you see as the relationship between the exhibition and the book?
GH: For me, exhibition and book are completely different forms, just pulled from the same material. The book is a more psychological experience, the exhibition a more physical experience. The different sizes allow viewers to interact physically with the work in different ways, and they act on you differently. The large prints can sometimes feel like they wash over you, and the landscape surrounds you; the small prints, if they work, call out to you, and pull you into them. Since the book sequence is fixed, the experience you create for the reader must be intensely controlled. With an exhibition there is usually no way to determine how a viewer will move through it, what sequence they will view the work in, and what associations they will make. Entire walls can be taken in quite quickly, and nearly infinite relationships can quickly be formed. It’s overwhelming but also a bit freeing compared to bookmaking, and I wind up being more playful and experimental, in part because I know it’s not permanent and I’ll change it each time I show the work in a new space.
LR: Your previous work has been marked by an underlying sense of violence and the trauma of the past. (I’m thinking particularly about ZZYZX but also Let the Sun Beheaded Be). King, Queen, Knave feels more introspective, so it is very interesting that you should describe place as being somehow internal. There is a latent, fatigued sadness, as though the people of Buffalo must remain strong to survive in this world.
I have always been interested in violence. Both drawn to it and scared of it, even disgusted by it. And yet it is such an essential part of life, of America, of masculinity, at least in my experience as a boy growing up in the 90s.
GH: It’s hard for me to comment on that, in a way, although I think you’re right that I have always been interested in violence. Both drawn to it and scared of it, even disgusted by it. And yet it is such an essential part of life, of America, of masculinity, at least in my experience as a boy growing up in the 90s. I deliberately sought it out in Let the Sun, because of the history of slavery and colonialism, but in my other work it’s been less front-and-center, but always in the background, or on the margins, or at least a force at play, that helped shape the scene I’m looking it. I suppose in the KQK work, I could see the tone being read as one of sadness and fatigue. I don’t like hearing that, in a way, because I dislike the idea of characterizing or reducing my hometown and the residents with those two words, and yet… life can be sad and fatiguing, especially in the darker later months of winter. I can’t deny that. Nor can I deny that your interpretation, or anyone’s for that matter, isn’t completely valid. You also use the words strength and survive though, which are important words to me, as are perseverance, injury, entropy, and resistance to it.
LR: This strength and resistance comes through in the portraits, particularly in the way that people hold themselves. They appear strong, with a quiet confidence in their pose, yet at the same time, each has their own underlying sense of vulnerability. Are these people that you know? How do you build and navigate these relationships?
I think the thing I find most moving and beautiful in a portrait is when a person allows themselves to be seen without fully presenting themselves, or controlling the narrative.
GH: I think the thing I find most moving and beautiful in a portrait is when a person allows themselves to be seen without fully presenting themselves, or controlling the narrative. People don’t describe themselves well. They are liars, in a way. We all are. Insecurity, our culture of self-aggrandizing self-presentation, and the oppression of “beauty” in omnipresent advertising imagery sort of just ruins everything. In a way, for men, it also gets back to how we (men of my generation) learned to be boys and men. How vulnerability was weakness, how it must be hid, and what’s always moved me is when that vulnerability (which I see as the only real source of strength and human connection) gets through visually, despite all efforts to hide it, even from ourselves.
LR: Games appear throughout King, Queen, Knave. There are dominos, the checkers board in the snow and dice. There is also the title of the work itself.
GH: Visually and symbolically games fascinate me, as well as the relationship between games and life, people and unspoken power dynamics. Games sometimes lay things bare. I’m particularly interested in older games and their design. I find them beautiful. There’s also something interesting and strange to me about the relationship between fun and violence here—a somewhat sinister quality to the content of games, where characters might be killed off, pawns might be sacrificed, etc. I’m also interested in the (very real, but also unsettling) idea of clear winners and losers, of “black and white” and the fact that the game, as they say at some point, is “over.”
LR: Perhaps this relates to a sense of being caught up in a world, where you don’t necessarily get to decide the rules?
GH: Exactly. Life is something that often just happens to us. Sometimes people are powerful enough to make the rules, and decide what happens. But most of us live in a world where those decisions, along with circumstances and other forces at play, largely determine our fates.
LR: Thank you for sharing your recent video piece with me. I’m interested to know more about it; the process of making it but also your experience of working with these other elements, like sound, which photographers don’t usually have to think about it. I’d also like to know more about how it ties in with the book.
GH: The film is shot on 16mm, with a few digital clips mixed in. It’s very much an experiment and a collaboration. Much of the footage was shot by my friend, the Dutch filmmaker Joppe Rog, often with us working together to compose the scene. The footage was slowly collected over a period of years, and I did the editing myself. I pieced it together in a somewhat similar way to how I make books, which is to slowly collect a broad range of material over an extended period, and then edit it together in a way that isn’t linear but somehow makes sense. It’s been amazing to work in a totally different medium. Exciting but also overwhelming—there are so many decisions that have to be made in filmmaking compared to still photography, and I have no idea how a full-length film ever gets made. Although shooting analog helps because it forced us to make decisions beforehand.
LR: One of my first thoughts when I first looked at KQK was about sound. I found myself imagining the sound of footsteps on fresh snow, the crackling of fire. There is something about the still, emptiness in your photographs, which seems to invite this – the soundtrack to your film is also quite sparse, even if it is instrumental.
GH: The sound is made by my friend the artist and musician Trevor Clement. He blended his own music with a handful of recordings I made, and we even made some sounds together in my garage, which was fun and a first for me. I’ve also been amazed by the power of sound, and the challenge of selecting or creating the right sound for the visuals, because it completely changes the entire piece. In terms of how the work feels to a viewer, I think it’s as important as the visuals themselves, which is also quite intimidating for me. With stills, I tend to know what I want. With this, it’s both exciting and maddening to not always know what I’m doing. But there’s something about sound that connects so directly to emotions. I think of all the art forms, music affects, or perhaps manipulates, the emotions more quickly than anything else, and without the intervention/delay of rational analysis. It’s immediate and powerful. I think the distance between the ears and the heart is the shortest of all the senses.
LR: Yes, I think that’s very true – this brings us back to the emotional intensity of the images themselves. How do you see your work developing going forward, particularly in relation to moving image, but also in terms of continuing to find and explore longer term projects?
GH: I’m at a funny place now. It’s actually the first time in almost 20 years I’m really not sure what’s next for me. I’ve always had at least one big, long-term project in the background I’m chipping away at, and I don’t know. It’s a little unsettling, but also liberating. I may continue to experiment with filmmaking, and sculpture. I’ve been playing with different still cameras because that sometimes unlodges something and frees you up to work in new ways. I’ve been photographing a lot of discarded things—things lying on the ground. I’m not sure what that’s about or if that will lead to anything, but you just have to start with instinct, desire and a hunch, and trust that it may lead you somewhere. Though I will probably always return to portraits. I think making portraits remains the most compelling aspect of what I tend to do—both the process and the results. I’ve been meeting people online more these days, and then arranging to meet them in the real world. I’m actually a fairly introverted, shy and solitary person, but I love the weird energy of that process—the awkwardness, the excitement and nervousness, the privilege of just getting time to be with someone and look at them. It often feels like a gift, and it seems afterwards that people really seem to appreciate being looked at, because they’ve chosen to be there. It’s a very different experience of approaching people on the street, but it’s one I’ve really been excited about and fascinated by lately. And similar to the pictures of things on the ground, I’m not entirely sure what it is, or where the pictures will go, but if you accumulate work for long enough, the shape of the thing kind of starts to make itself known to you. It’s not exactly the most efficient process, but it does slowly take form, and it does seem to be how the process has to work for me.
Thank you to Gregory Halpern for his time and generous answers and Tom Winter at Huxley Parlour for making this happen.
