ZZYZX by Gregory Halpern

This is a collection of works by American photographer Gregory Halpern, who was a candidate for the international photography group Magnum Photos and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014.

Early American settlers called California the land of gold and plenty. Today, while there is obvious mockery in the sprawling streets, the tangled roads, and the slums, it is difficult to describe it succinctly. It is a place where disparate elements, from sublime beauty to psychedelia to self-destruction, coexist in a kind of mysterious harmony. Every place is full of contradictions and unpredictability, but California tends to be more extreme. A place where culture and history, beauty and ugliness, redemption and despair coexist, a place that is both transcendent and pitiless, this book begins with a view of the wilderness east of Los Angeles and ends with a view of the Pacific Ocean as it travels westward. The journey westward is not just an allusion to the longing for the sea, but a parallel to the history of the great American development, the great pioneering that the early settlers of the eastern United States had taken to the Pacific Ocean, which they had declared to be their self-evident destiny. The lands, people, and creatures photographed in this work existed before they became the artist's subjects, but by composing and editing the series of photographs as if it were a work of fiction or fantasy, they are presented as a scene from the daily life of a California that is on the brink of collapse, unable to cope with its distorted population.

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Title: ZZYZX
Artist: Gregory Halpern
MACK, 2016
Hardcover, 240 x 290 mm
128 pages
First edition, third printing
¥6,750 + tax