Gregory Halpern – ZZYZX

"[…] traditional American landscape photography has become a rather moribund photographic trope [...] a sanctified, cliched reverence has become the norm. In Halpern’s California work, I see him removing himself from the comforts of the past and endeavoring to strike out afresh, rethinking his conditioning and antecedents to break free of this particular mould." — Chris Killip Gregory Halpern (born 1977) is a successfull contemporary American photographer. His new book "ZZYZX" shows 77 photographs that were made, with a few excep-tions, in and around Los Angeles between 2008 and 2015. The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera, but he has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction or fantasy - a structure, sequence and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the brink of collap-sing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.