Winner of the 2016 Paris Photo PhotoBook of the Year Award.
 
Early settlers called California the Golden State and the Land of Milk and Honey. Today, urban sprawl, tangled interchanges and slums create obvious ironies, but the place cannot easily be reduced to a clichéd paradise or its collapse. Seen together, the sublime, psychedelic and self-destructive form a strange harmony. Like everywhere, it is contradictory and unpredictable, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist; beauty sits beside ugliness, redemption beside despair, all beneath a singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh.
 
The images begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city to the Pacific. This movement evokes thirst for water and America's westward expansion, driven towards the ocean in pursuit of its “manifest” destiny.
 
The people, places and animals existed before Halpern's camera, but he has assembled them into fiction or fantasy: a structure, sequence and edit that, like Los Angeles itself, seems close to collapsing beneath its own strangely shaped mass.