SECOND EDITION
In this new edition of Omaha Sketchbook, Gregory Halpern returns to his lyrical yet equivocal account of the American heartland. Compiled over fifteen years of photographing Omaha, Nebraska, the book forms a prescient meditation on America, the men and boys who inhabit it, and the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy, and power. In loosely collaged spreads that reproduce his construction-paper sketchbooks, Halpern takes pleasure in dissonance and unexpected harmony, playing on a sense of simultaneous repulsion and attraction to the place. Halpern has significantly altered the first iteration of the book with a new cover and thirty-five previously unseen photographs, breathing life into his original notion that this project is a working sketchbook he will return to and revise periodically.
Throughout his career, Gregory Halpern has explored the elusive, inchoate notion of Americanness. It is both a difficult subject and a lofty prospect for any photographer and it remains an absolutely essential line of investigation, particularly in the context of the current political maelstrom. 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 pluralized, 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. Halpern’s efforts to visualize America yield an opportunity to learn about the country by staring back at images of it that breed their own complexity. – Amanda Maddox, J. Paul Getty Museum
144 pages, 29 x 23 cm, softcover, MACK (London).