Gregory Halpern and Paul Graham

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.

Verdigris / Ambergris completes a twelve-year suite of works by Paul Graham focused on life’s transience and our mortality. This pair of sibling books is centered on people scanning the infinite horizon as they look out over land (Verdigris) and sea (Ambergris). Interleaved with these contemplative portraits in the first volume are images of cherry blossoms and in the second images of the setting sun. These photographs are made respectively in a park overlooking post-industrial New Jersey, in which Graham has worked for the past seven years, and along the northern coast of Long Island, where there is a long tradition of watching the setting sun.

Graham takes these archetypal objects of natural beauty – and their observers – to form a layered examination of the ways we see and experience the beauty of the world. While the portraits of horizon-watchers are captured with golden-hour clarity, the interleaved images in each volume have been corrupted through the process of their creation. The blossom images in Verdigris are captured on a digital camera set to an ultra-resolution mode that uses multiple micro-shifted exposures. But disturbed by the gentle motion of a breeze, the camera struggles to assemble a coherent representation. Meanwhile the saturated sunsets of Ambergris result from a camera that is uniquely able to collect colour information at every pixel site, rather than approximate colour from nearby pixels. Pushed beyond its limits, the images become stained with artefacts of the overwhelming intensity of information.

With this dazzling new series, Graham embraces the flaws of his tools to evoke the transience of life, its bountiful wonder, and the degradation and demise inexorably bound to beauty.