For more than two decades, Gregory Halpern has photographed in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York, carefully developing the series that forms his latest monograph. King, Queen, Knave presents an idiosyncratic vision of a city amid its contradictions, challenging familiar narratives of post-industrial decline and embracing an enigmatic strain of reality bordering on surrealism. Its compelling sequence unfolds like a stage, where distinct, unpredictable characters appear among solitary buildings, snowdrifts and sun-bleached scenes of everyday transcendence.
 
The images often place their subjects within the particularities of a season, balancing a historical project with the immediacy of each luminous moment. Exploring reversal and ascension, Halpern confronts the complexities of his birthplace and contemporary America, seeing beauty intertwined with ugliness and redemption with despair. This lyrical work testifies to the endless complexity of a place at once familiar and unknown.