The photographer’s novel work,named after a village in the Mojave desert, exploits the golden state’s unique light to create mysterious, and surreal images
• Gregory Halpern’s ZZYXZ – in pictures‘Los Angeles is so massive,confusing, beautiful, and harsh and strange that it nearly defies you to execute work about it,” says the photographer Gregory Halpern. “It is an impossible project in a way.” In his intriguingly titled novel book, ZZYZX – named after a village on the edge of the Mojave desert in Saint Bernardino County – Halpern has created a California of the intellect, and a place both genuine and metaphorical,familiar yet alien. The photographs hold all kinds of resonances from the dark, surreal films of David Lynch to the anxious urban neighbourhoods evoked in the early essays of Joan Didion.
Even the light in Los Angeles seems compromised: there’s a beautiful haziness to it caused by the pollution in the airThere's still a notion of manifest destiny in California but also that it’s the discontinuance of the dream… you can fade no furtherContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com