New work by American photographer, Gregory Halpern, will go on display at Huxley-Parlour gallery for the first time to coincide with the launch of his book Omaha Sketchbook published by MACK.

Gregory Halpern has been photographing in Omaha, Nebraska, for the past 15 years, steadily compiling a lyrical, if equivocal response to the American Heartland. 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.

‘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.’ – Amanda Maddox, J. Paul Getty Museum.

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.

Gregory Halpern was born in 1977 in Buffalo, New York. He has published a number of books, including A (2011), Omaha Sketchbook (2009), East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2014), a collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato, ZZYZX (2016), and Confederate Moons (2018). He also edited, with Jason Fulford, The Photographer’s Playbook Over 250 Assignments and Ideas (2014). Halpern is a Nominee Member of Magnum Photos and has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.