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Gregory Halpern 的失落地带美国故事
原创 上海摄影艺术中心 SCOP
也许是因为自身的生活经历，Gregory Halpern 聚焦美国工业化进程及西进运动中那些曾经盛极一时而如今却时过境迁，走向经济衰败的城市。包括了内陆地区的“心脏地带”，以及被好莱坞“粉饰太平”的东部及西南地区的传统工业重镇。
“我对这个世界感兴趣的是它的混乱和矛盾，对立面之间的关系是如此美丽。”一个个近于虚构的片段，讲述着连贯而完整的社会故事，Gregory Halpern 的作品摆脱了传统的纪实概念。他以现实为基础，试图寻找一种纪实摄影与幻想元素的神秘中间地带。在他的作品中，那些真实的地方带着隐喻，熟悉而陌生。这种注入想象的表达充满了对现实生活和社会状况的洞察。
Halpern 形容自己是一名依靠直觉创作的摄影师，他的几个主要系列《A》 (2011)、 《ZZYZX》 (2016)和《Confederate Moons》 (2018)，《Omaha Sketchbook》（2019），揭示了贯穿他摄影生涯的直觉这一核心线索：一部美国失落地带忧郁的田园牧歌。
Gregory Halpern 主要系列
及摄影出版物
Halpern 至今已经与诸多著名出版机构合作了多本摄影书，在他的摄影生涯中，出版物是不可或缺的一个重要部分。“我喜欢图片之间的空间。当你翻页的时候，看着新照片的同时前一页的景象还萦绕心头的时候，那种复杂的感受……我喜欢被一本摄影集清空头脑的感觉，仿佛被溪流涤荡心灵。那个期待的瞬间，下一秒就会有所发现的预期，无论是让人感到无聊还是疲惫，始终会在我们每次手持新书时应约而至。我们用最单纯而本能的姿态，准备好被接下来阅读的内容所改变。” Halpern 如是说道。
《A》（2011）
J&L Books
“生命在这里诞生，人们在这里坠入爱河，有人说这座城市正在消亡，但它同时也在不断新生。”加拿大策展人、作家 Brian Sholis 这样说道。破败的城市和充满生机的自然在矛盾中和谐并存，许多肖像（无论人还是动物）都直勾勾地看着镜头，似乎在直面等待观者做出回应。
Études Books
MACK Books
《ZZYZX》中的图像处处是隐喻：自东向西的推移暗示了对水源的渴望，同时也是美国不断向西扩张发展的方向。手掌中伸向阳光的星星，似乎是“美国梦”的化身。森林大火贯穿整个系列，时不时出现的红色火焰似乎暗示着一种对于美国人来说挥之不去的恐惧，并警醒着他们。
TBW Books
虽然《Confederate Moons》这个系列最初来自日全食的启发，但这部作品最终更多地成为对现状的思考：是什么让人们彼此分离，又是什么让大家凝聚在了一起。Halpern 对那年发生在天空中的罕见奇观与现实生活间的交集充满兴趣，也用自己的方式，在作品中做到了真实和魔幻两个极端摄影状态的共存。
MACK Books
“Halpern 为美国的形象化的努力，给我们提供了一个机会，通过回顾那些孕育其自身复杂性的美国图像来了解这个国家。”J. Paul Getty 美术馆副馆长 Amanda Maddox 如是说道。
Editor’s note
Gregory Halpern has focused his career on an exploration of the elusive, nascent notion of Americanness in a lyrical and poetic way, continuing the concept of "documentary lyricism" associated with the work of Walker Evans.
American photographer Gregory Halpern was born in Buffalo, New York State, which is located in the old industrial area of the Great Lakes, and is also known as the "rust belt". After the 1950s, with the economic recession that followed the collapse of industries in the industrial zone around the Great Lakes, high unemployment in Buffalo led to a sharp decline in population and traffic in and out of the city. Once the second largest city in the eastern United States, Buffalo went into decline.
Beginning from his own life experience, Halpern focused his career on exploring American industrialization, and those cities that once flourished but then fell into economic decline. This includes the American “heartland”, the traditional industrial towns in the east and the southwest, that have been whitewashed by Hollywood.
“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,” says Halpern of his practice. There are many fragments close to fiction, which tell a cogent social story. Halpern’s photography breaks away from the familiar approach to documentary. Still based on reality, he seeks a mysterious middle ground between documentary and fantasy. In his photographs, real places become metaphorical; familiar yet unfamiliar. This expression of imagination is infused with insight into the reality of life and the social condition.
Halpern describes himself as a photographer who relies on intuition. His major series’ A (2011), ZZYZX (2016), Confederate Moons (2018) and Omaha Sketchbook (2019), reveal how intuition has been applied through his photographic life, which might be summarized as a melancholy pastoral of the lost land of America.
Main works and photographic publications of Gregory Halpern
Halpern has worked with many well-known publishers on a number of photobooks, which are an important part of his photography career. “I love the space between images,” he says, “the things that happen when you turn the page, when you are looking at a new image with the ghost of the previous image lingering in your mind… I love the feel of a being swept up, as if by a stream, by a book of photographs. That moment of expectation, that prospect of discovery, however dulled or wearied, is still there each time we take a new book in our hands. At our most innocent and instinctive, we are prepared to be changed in some way by what we are about to see.”
A（2011）
J&L Books
Taken between 2008 and 2011, the series A is most closely associated with traditional documentary narrative among Halpern’s works. In A, Halpern leads us on a ramble through the beautiful and ruined streets of the American Rust Belt. The cast of characters, both human and animal, are portrayed with compassion and respect. As a native, he is drawn to the cities -- Baltimore, Cincinnati, Omaha, Detroit -- share similar histories with his hometown, and in this post-apocalyptic springtime all forms of life emerge.
“Babies are born there. People fall in love there. Certain people would say the city is dying, but it’s also continually being reborn,” says Canadian curator and writer Brian Sholis. The dilapidated city and the vibrant nature coexist harmoniously in the contradiction. Many portraits (human and animal) stare at the camera, as if waiting for responses from viewers.
East of the Sun, West of the Moon（2014）
Études Books
East of the Sun, West of the Moon were made on the solstices and equinoxes of 2012 and 2013. These photographs ware done by Halpern and his wife, Ahndraya Parlato, who is also a photographer. They wandered around the United States aimlessly, thinking about the meaning of time. The time of the solstices and equinoxes are fleeting, like the instants in photography, which led them to take photos using slow shutter speed or multiple exposures. These photographs show an America where no one is selling anything, no one is hurting anybody, in which pitbulls are puppies and broken fences are sewn back together. The images are gentle in both subject and execution; a quest for peacefulness that is rarely achieved.
ZZYZX（2016）
MACK Books
The early settlers dubbed California “the Golden State, the Land of Milk and Honey”. Today there are the obvious ironies for a place once regarded as paradise to now be home to skid row. The photos in ZZYZX begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific, presenting an unpredictable and contradictory Los Angeles.
This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, as well as the original expansion of America, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific, thereby fulfilling its “manifest” destiny. Stars reaching for sunlight reads as the embodiment of the American Dream. This book is full of suggestions about underlying fear, embodied in the forest fires Halpern captured, and hints at the need for an awakening.
The people, places, and animals in the book are sewn together into a work of fiction or fantasy. "I hope that these works will evoke modern and ancient, but not so straightforward thoughts, and pay homage to Los Angeles at that time. I want to present a mythical space and a grand timeline." Therefore, Los Angeles in ZZYZX is much more than a real Los Angeles where the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing.
Confederate Moons（2018）
TBW Books
“I was fascinated,” Halpern says, “by the idea that the entire nation was staring at the sun, reveling in the apocalyptic thrill of watching the moon temporarily extinguish our life-source, all together.” During a summer marked by a total eclipse of the sun in 2017, Halpern chose North and South Carolina as the stage in which to capture the dramatic state when this rare and fleeting event happens. At that time, everyone all together was staring at the sun in a wonderful unity.
Although the idea for Confederate Moons was initially inspired by this celestial phenomenon, the work ultimately became more of a meditation of the current state of the nation; what brings people together and what separates them. Halpern has a long-standing interest in the drama of celestial coincidence intersected with the moments of life in that year.
Omaha Sketchbook（2019）
MACK Books
For the last fifteen years, Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska, steadily compiling a lyrical, if equivocal, response to the American Heartland. In loosely-collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in cognitive dissonance and unexpected harmonies, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. “Omaha Sketchbook is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power." MACK Books describes it. America as pluralized, fragmented, and teeming with its own 'brand of hypermasculinity’.
“Halpern’s efforts to visualize America yield an opportunity to learn about the country by staring back at images of it that breed their own complexity.” Amanda Maddox (J. Paul Getty Museum) says.
摄影师 Gregory Halpern 1977年出生于纽约州布法罗市（Buffalo），分别获得哈佛大学的历史和文学学士学位及加州艺术学院的硕士学位。2014年获得古根汉基金奖，2018年成为马格南图片社提名成员，目前在纽约州罗切斯特理工学院教授摄影。
SCoP Conversation
『 SCoP Conversation 影像对话栏目 』依靠有关摄影，摄影的历史，现在和未来的广泛观点，来激发关于这个媒介的新对话。我们的栏目始于这样一个信念：摄影是一种独特的媒介，具有向世界投射直接的、不寻常的、动态视角的能力。在这里，你可以看到深思熟虑的观点下，那些发人深省的作品。
“SCoP Conversation" draws upon wide-ranging ideas about photography, its history, its present and its future to inspire new conversations about the medium. Our conversations start from the belief that photography is a distinctive medium with the capacity to project direct, unusual and dynamic perspectives on the world. Here you find thought-provoking bodies of work underscored by thoughtful points of view.
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