A Lyrical Ode to America's Heartland

Gregory Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska for the past 15 years, steadily compiling a lyrical, if ambivalent response to the American Heartland and continuing the photographer’s investigations of locations and persons that fly under the radar.

New images from this body of work will go on display at Huxley-Parlour gallery for the first time to coincide with the launch of his monograph Omaha Sketchbook, published by MACK.

Halpern’s series explores notions of cognitive dissonance and unexpected harmonies, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. The series is ultimately a meditation on America, on the men and boys who inhabit it, and on the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power.

Amanda Maddox of the J. Paul Getty Museum says this of the work: “Travelling to the nation’s heartland – a vague construct increasingly synonymous with the Bible belt – Halpern continues to mine this idea of Americanness in a place bounded by prairie and steeped in pioneer history. His work in the Midwestern city of Omaha reveals America as pluralised, fragmented, and teeming with its own ‘brand of hypermasculinity’, as he terms it: adolescents on the cusp of promise or obscurity, land that seemingly leads to nowhere, a sense of unending time and a dark side to domesticity.”

The exhibition coincides with the launch of the MACK publication, Omaha Sketchbook and follows on from his award-winning bestseller ZZYZX also published by MACK.

Halpern teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is a 2018 Magnum nominee.

— Samantha Reinders

“Omaha Sketchbook”
Gregory Halpern
Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London
September 19 – October 12, 2019