Look at Magnum photographer Gregory Halpern’s images of Buffalo, New York and you’ll see stark contrasts and contradictions. It is a place full of obstacles and hardship: relentless snowfall that lasts for months on end; a decline of industry and population in the city’s postwar era; a lack of both infrastructure and opportunity.
In one image, vibrant wildflowers grow in thick, yellow-tipped swathes across the foreground of weathered industrial structures. A windswept wooden house leans sleepily, its vacant innards exposed to a flurry of snowfall. A single white deer gazes ahead, ears poised, focused as if bracing for danger.
It’s taken from King, Queen, Knave, a new book in which Halpern examines his native city – located within America’s rust belt – over the course of 20 years. Halpern, whose exhibitions and publications have long explored the intricacies of Americana, is a master observer.
“My grandmother lived in Manhattan,” says Halpern on our Zoom call, sporting his trademark blue chore jacket and horn-rimmed spectacles, “which is a five-hour drive for us. As a young child, visiting her felt pretty exciting. I remember riding the bus with her, facing the adjacent row full of strangers, and her telling me: don’t stare, but I couldn’t help myself.”
Halpern found himself thinking about this fascination with faces while making King, Queen, Knave: “To look at how the light moves when they move. I still find that a very remarkable thing about photography.”
Halpern spent his many planned visits to his Buffalo-based father armed with the revered hulk of a Pentax 67 camera, restricted to 12 exposures with each precious roll of film. In retracing half-familiar paths, searching for the crucial, elusive essence of home, Halpern was tasked with the job of immortalising a place layered with the familiar and the alien.
“I feel like this was the hardest project that I’ve ever done,” he says, candidly. “You would think it would be the easiest somehow, but emotionally, just going home, it’s always complicated. I think, there’s the sense that growing up if you’re going to succeed you’re supposed to leave, and not come back. So in a way, there’s a sense of pleasure in leaving, but nowhere else has felt more like home since I left.”
The concept of home is a central theme in American photography and there are fleeting glimpses here of traits from the lineage of artists before him. A glance at Halpern’s nighttime photograph of a nondescript suburban house, exhaling smooth, inverted pyramidic chimney smoke, evokes the otherworldliness of Todd Hido’s oeuvre. Seeing a young woman at the water’s edge, deep in thought, conjures the cinematic, enigmatic energy of a Philip-Lorca diCorcia image, framed with the intimacy reserved for a story’s central characters. There is, however, another influence – that of a mentor of Halpern’s, whose simultaneously gritty and gentle works helped change the perception of working-class life on both sides of the Atlantic.
“I think the main influence for King, Queen, Knave, was Chris Killip,” Halpern says, in acknowledgment of the acclaimed British black-and-white photographer who documented the harshness and the hidden beauty in northern England’s de-industrialisation and surrounding hardships. “He’d always advised me to go back home and slowly chip away at a project, much like his own methodology. In King, Queen, Knave, there’s an image of a friend of mine, walking through a snowstorm, wearing a balaclava and trench coat. That was a direct nod to Chris and his work.”
The role of the elementsin King, Queen, Knave is dramatic: dozens of sallow apples are left to rot beneath a tree; a visor-clad woman picks flowers in a meadow eclipsed by a power station; a warehouse appears in the midst of a fire, its foreground alight with subsiding embers. Across the 112 pages, we see seasons change and life begin anew. The dichotomies of nature and industrialisation appear as clear and curious as ever.
The book stands apart from its peers thanks to a recurring motif: a leucistic (white), female deer named April. She appears haphazardly across the publication, like a portent or spectre.
“April felt like a perfect, surreal, ghost-like recurring character, to open and close the book with,” he says. “She’s a celebrity in the neighbourhood, so it would be like a thing if you spotted April, and posted on social media. I don’t know if I can articulate exactly what she means to me, but she’s pretty special.”
King, Queen, Knave feels as though it captures a moment in Buffalo. When I ask Halpern about the publication and its links both to the American dream and the turbulent politics of the past two decades, he pauses. “It’s not a political, or activistic body of work, but of course, there is a connection. People on the coasts and in academia in the US are often isolated and protected from what working-class America looks like. For example, 28.3% of Buffalo is living beneath the poverty line, and like many other places in America, people feel ignored. Without wanting to evoke pity, there is a complex, beautiful life being lived in Buffalo that many people don’t know or think about. For the first time in half a century, the city’s population grew in the last few years, mainly because it became a real hub for refugees. That’s been a positive change in the city’s life.”
Much like Halpern’s image of a frost-covered chequerboard, the game of life in New York’s once flourishing and industrious city, although fraught with hardships, is still there for the taking by the brave and the bold.