Fourth printing
The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions and skid row – but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together – the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. The place is unpredictable and contradictory, like all places, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.
The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to the drought and a general thirst for water, as well as the expansion of America as a nation, which was born in the east and which, hungry and angry, drove itself west until reaching the Pacific, fulfilling its “Manifest Destiny.”
The people, places, and animals in the book really 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 teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass. In that sense it mimics how the city felt to the photographer when he was making the work.
Gregory Halpern was born in 1977 in Buffalo, New York. He has published a number of books, including A (2011), Omaha Sketchbook (2009) and East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2014), a collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato. He also edited, along with Jason Fulford, the hugely successful title The Photographer’s Playbook: Over 250 Assignments and Ideas (2014). He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Published by MACK (London).
128 pages, 24.5 cm × 29.9 cm, hardcover, MACK (London).