King, Queen, Knave — Gregory Halpern. Published by MACK.
It’s never easy to photograph your hometown. You know it too well, and you’d think it unlikely to throw any surprises your way. Yet Greg overcomes the scourge of familiarity as, over the course of two decades, he has burrowed beneath the surface to celebrate Buffalo’s magical, glimmering core.
Greg now lives in Rochester, a little over an hour away, a distance which must surely have helped him physically, mentally, and metaphorically. It allows the Buffalo he depicts to be at once familiar and obscure, intimate and removed. It’s also dark and foreboding, the sagacious sequencing adding to the sense of disquiet as one relatively small American city becomes a microcosm for a much bigger picture.
I never thought I’d say this, but KQK might be even better than ZZYZX.
Mark Power is a photographer and member of Magnum Photos.