Gregory Halpern

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated colonial history. Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling new work, an extension of his characteristic attention to the way details of a landscape, and the people who inhabit it, often reveal undercurrents of local histories and experiences. A text by curator and editor Clément Chéroux grapples with the island’s history in relation to the French Revolution, Surrealism, and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, whose writing inspired the title of the book and many of the images inside

Gregory Halpern (born in Buffalo, New York, 1977) received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published six books of his work: Harvard Works Because We Do (2003), A (2011), East of the Sun, West of the Moon (in collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato, 2014), ZZYZX (2016), Confederate Moons (2018), and Omaha Sketchbook (2019). He is coeditor of The Photographer’s Playbook (with Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2014) and teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York.

Clément Chéroux is senior curator in the department of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Previously, he served as chief curator of photography at the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and former editor of the website The Great Leap Sideways. His publication One Wall a Web (2018) won the 2018 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.