"King, Queen, Knave"
Gregory Halpern’s photographs don’t shout—they linger.
They capture moments that feel both intimate and distant, familiar and strange. A man on a corner, the light catching his face just so.
A street at dusk, empty but alive with something you can’t quite name. His images invite you to look again, to notice what’s been there all along, hidden in plain sight.
They reveal a world that is raw, fleeting, and full of quiet connections—moments where solitude and belonging overlap, where one bleeds into the other.
Through his lens, reality becomes sharper, more vivid, more real. This panel starts there, in a dialogue with Luca Fiore: with the idea that seeing, really seeing, can change the way we understand each other and the lives we share.
That through the eye of the artist, we can find ourselves closer to the truth—and maybe, closer to one another.
SPEAKERS
Gregory Halpern
Gregory was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1977. He is known for a distinctive style of documentary photography that is rooted in both the real and the sublime. This approach has led him to photograph, among other things, life in post-industrial towns of the American Rust Belt, the people and places of Los Angeles, and the uniquely unifying experience of a total solar eclipse. Of his practice, he says, “What’s interesting to me about the world is its chaos and contradictions, the way opposites can be so beautiful in relation to each other.”
Though Halpern says he is primarily motivated by the desire to “create” rather than “document,” his work is powerfully affecting in its reflection of the world around us. A study of working conditions for service employees at Harvard, created while he was a student there, resulted in a successful bid for a living wage and was published as a book, Harvard Works Because We Do (2003). ZZYZX, his fantastical book of photographs of Los Angeles published by MACK in 2016, is now in its fourth edition. King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK in 2024, brings together two decades of work from his hometown of Buffalo.
Halpern became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2018, an associate member two years later, and a full member in 2023. He has published eight monographs, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and his photographs are in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He teaches photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Luca Fiore
Luca Fiore (Milan, 1978) is a journalist, critic and independent curator. He writes about photography for Il Foglio, Domani, Il Giornale dell’arte and Aperture. He is in the Faculty of the Master of Photography at IUAV in Venice. He curated exhibitions by Mario Cresci, Antonio Rovaldi, Jürgen Nefzger, Gus Powell and Curran Hatleberg. He participated in Giovanni Frangi’s project L’intervista (Magonza, 2021), a volume collecting eleven interviews with the painter based in Milan. He also edited Stupidity Exercise Manual (Skira, 2022), an artist’s book by Andrea Bianconi. In 2019 he co-curated with Borys Filonenko the exhibition Aeneas Passes On. Ukranian Contest at the Yermilov Centre in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
