by Jerome D.
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Introduction
Gregory Halpern (b. 1977, Buffalo, New York) is one of the most acclaimed photobook makers of his generation — a full member of Magnum Photos and professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, whose patient, ambiguous, and quietly surreal colour photographs occupy a deliberately unstable territory between documentary record and fiction.
He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. He has taught at California College of the Arts, Cornell University, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard University, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design before settling into his current position at RIT. He is married to the American photographer Ahndraya Parlato, with whom he has collaborated on projects including East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2014).
His breakthrough book, ZZYZX (2016) — named after an unincorporated community in the Mojave Desert — won the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year award. The project took five years to make and another full year to edit, drawing from an estimated one thousand rolls of film, roughly half of which were shot during a single year made possible by a Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded in 2014. ZZYZX follows a route from the eastern edge of California, through locations Halpern selected at random from Google Maps, toward Los Angeles and finally the Pacific Ocean — building what he has described as "a semi-fictional world" out of the contemporary American landscape.
His other major books include Harvard Works Because We Do (2004), an early documentary project on Harvard's service workers; A (2011), made in the American Rust Belt; Omaha Sketchbook (2019, expanded edition, MACK), fifteen years of photographs made in Omaha, Nebraska; Let the Sun Beheaded Be (2020), made over several months in the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe; and King, Queen, Knave (2024), a twenty-year project photographing his home city of Buffalo.
He became a nominee member of Magnum Photos and has since achieved full membership — a significant recognition for a photographer whose work sits, by his own description, closer to art photography and the photobook tradition than to classical photojournalism.
As he has said of his own position: "I am a white man with institutional support, and all the privileges and benefits therein, and yet some of my projects look towards those on the margins and the disenfranchised."
Camera Gear Used by Gregory Halpern
Halpern's gear is confirmed with unusual consistency across multiple independent sources, including a 1earthmedia profile, Analog Forever Magazine's survey of contemporary film documentary photographers, and a Substack photobook review that references his specific camera choices in relation to individual images. All sources agree on the same core kit.
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| Gregory Halpern's cameras |
Medium Format: Mamiya 7
Mamiya 7 — Confirmed across multiple independent sources as one of his two primary 6×7 medium format cameras. The Mamiya 7 is a rangefinder camera — not a reflex system — producing 6×7cm negatives on 120 film with exceptional optical quality from its fixed lens mounts. Its rangefinder design makes it significantly lighter and quieter than an SLR equivalent, well suited to Halpern's patient, exploratory way of working across vast stretches of landscape and long days on the road.
Medium Format: Pentax 67
Pentax 67 — Confirmed as his second primary 6×7 system, used alongside the Mamiya 7. Unlike the Mamiya's rangefinder design, the Pentax 67 is a true single-lens reflex camera at medium format scale — effectively an oversized 35mm SLR shooting 6×7cm frames, with interchangeable lenses and full through-the-lens viewing. A photobook review of his 2024 book King, Queen, Knave notes specifically that "the depth of field he's getting with his medium format Pentax 67 really helps elevate" a particular image — direct confirmation that the Pentax remains part of his current working kit, not simply an earlier-career tool.
The choice to maintain two distinct 6×7 systems — one rangefinder, one reflex — likely reflects different working needs: the Mamiya 7's quieter, lighter rangefinder operation for situations requiring discretion or extended handheld carrying, and the Pentax 67's reflex viewing and depth-of-field preview for situations where precise framing and selective focus are more important than portability.
Large Format: 4×5 View Camera
4×5 large format camera — Confirmed across multiple sources as part of his working kit alongside the medium format systems: "and 4×5 shooting color negative film." No specific 4×5 model or brand is confirmed in available primary sources, and consistent with this site's editorial policy, none is listed here. The use of large format alongside medium format reflects a working method in which Halpern selects his camera system based on the specific demands of a given image or location, rather than committing to a single format for an entire project.
Film Stock
Colour negative film — Confirmed as his primary medium across all three camera systems: "4×5 shooting color negative film." Colour negative film offers significantly greater exposure latitude than colour transparency (slide) film — a practical advantage for a photographer working intuitively, in variable and often harsh daylight conditions, across long, improvisational road trips where reshooting is rarely an option.
Printing: Optically Enlarged Chromogenic Prints
Optically enlarged chromogenic prints (self-printed) — Confirmed as his preferred printing method, distinguishing his practice from photographers who scan their negatives for digital output: "that he prints himself as optically enlarged chromogenic prints." Optical enlargement is the traditional analogue darkroom process — projecting the negative through an enlarger lens directly onto light-sensitive photographic paper — as opposed to a digital scan-and-print workflow. This is a labour-intensive, hands-on process that gives Halpern direct control over exposure, colour balance, and contrast at the printing stage, continuous with the analogue character of his entire working method from capture through to final print.
His editing process extends this same hands-on physicality: he has developed an unusual method of cutting up contact prints and arranging them on specially built shelves, where they remain for months while he works out the sequence and structure of a book — an editing process as deliberately slow and physical as his image-making.
Technique and Style
Gregory Halpern's photography occupies what he has described as the space between documentary and fiction — a deliberately unstable territory in which images that appear to record real places and real people are sequenced and contextualised in ways that build something closer to a constructed, semi-imagined world. "Over the years I've become less interested in documentary and more interested in the space between fiction and non-fiction, which sometimes feels like Surrealism to me."
This approach crystallised most fully during the making of ZZYZX, where he selected locations across California partly at random — using Google Maps as a tool for introducing chance and unfamiliarity into his process — and allowed the sequence of images to construct a version of the state that was simultaneously documentary and invented. "It became most obvious when I was working on ZZYZX, which starts with contemporary Los Angeles but sort of builds a semi-fictional world out of the city."
His working method is intuitive rather than pre-planned: "I tend to photograph intuitively, photographing what I'm attracted to." This intuitive responsiveness, combined with an extremely long working timeline — five years for ZZYZX, fifteen years for Omaha Sketchbook, twenty years for King, Queen, Knave — produces bodies of work with a depth of accumulated observation that cannot be replicated through shorter, more deliberate projects.
His subject matter consistently returns to class, masculinity, beauty, hope, despair, rage, death, and contradiction — his own stated list of central concerns. His portraits, in particular, carry a quality of vulnerability and risk that he has described candidly: "Photographing people is almost always strange and awkward, but also wonderful and unpredictable. I get nervous because I'm actually quite introverted, I have to work up the guts."
His relationship to the format he shoots and the format he publishes is itself a meaningful aesthetic choice. He shoots on large 6×7 and 4×5 negatives capable of producing enormous, highly detailed exhibition prints — yet he conceives of his work primarily in terms of books rather than exhibitions, and the prints he makes from these large negatives are frequently reproduced in his books at the scale of small contact prints. The large format camera, in his practice, is not principally a tool for maximising exhibition print size — it is a tool for the specific quality of looking, depth of field, and tonal range that large negatives provide, regardless of the eventual output scale.
How to Imitate His Style in Post-Processing
Halpern's colour aesthetic — rich, slightly desaturated, with a quality of muted naturalism rather than vivid punch — comes from colour negative film printed optically rather than scanned and processed digitally. Pixlr is a useful tool for approaching this look in a digital workflow:
Desaturate slightly and evenly.
His colour palette avoids the punchy saturation common in contemporary colour photography. In Pixlr's HSL tool, pull global saturation down by a modest 10%, keeping the reduction even across hues rather than targeting specific colours. The goal is a quieter, more naturalistic palette.
Add depth through tonal range, not contrast.
Large and medium format colour negative film holds extraordinary detail across a wide tonal range. In Pixlr's Curves tool, use a very gentle, extended S-curve rather than a steep one — separating tones gradually rather than punching up contrast aggressively.
Allow some ambiguity in the frame.
His compositions often include elements that are not fully explained or resolved — a figure half-seen, an object whose purpose is unclear, a landscape that could be specific or could be anywhere. When cropping or framing in Pixlr, resist the instinct to clarify or simplify every element. Some visual ambiguity is part of the intended effect.
Print, don't just screen.
Halpern's prints are physical, hand-made objects — chromogenic prints made through optical enlargement. While most photographers today work entirely in digital editing and screen-based viewing, consider printing your strongest images, even at small contact-print scale, to evaluate whether they hold the tonal and colour qualities you intend.
How to Shoot Like Gregory Halpern
Commit to projects measured in years, not weeks.
His major bodies of work take five, fifteen, even twenty years to complete. This is not slowness for its own sake — it reflects a belief that meaningful depth in a body of work requires sustained, repeated engagement with a place over a very long period. Choose a place or theme you can return to for years, not months.
Introduce chance into your location scouting.
His use of Google Maps to select random locations across California for ZZYZX was a deliberate strategy for avoiding the predictable, pre-conceived image of a place. Try selecting locations through some element of chance — a map, a list, a recommendation from a stranger — rather than only photographing places you already know you want to photograph.
Work across multiple formats within a single project.
His use of both the Mamiya 7, Pentax 67, and 4×5 within the same body of work suggests that format choice can be responsive to the specific image rather than fixed for an entire project. Consider carrying more than one camera system if different situations call for different qualities of depth of field, handling speed, or discretion.
Let the work sit before you sequence it.
His practice of cutting up contact prints and leaving them on shelves for months before finalising a book sequence reflects a belief that meaning and structure emerge slowly, through repeated viewing over time, rather than through a single editing session. Build extended time into your own editing process.
Photograph what unsettles you about your own position.
His direct acknowledgement of his own institutional privilege, and his explicit interrogation of what it means to photograph people on the margins from that position, reflects an ethical seriousness that shapes the work itself. Before beginning a project involving other people's lives, consider your own relationship to the subject honestly.
Print your own work whenever possible.
His commitment to optical printing — rather than scanning and digital output — gives him a direct, hands-on relationship with the final image that a purely digital workflow does not provide. If you shoot film, learn the darkroom process, even if only occasionally, to understand what your negatives are actually capable of.
Legacy
Gregory Halpern's contribution to contemporary photography is most significant within the specific tradition of the American photobook — a tradition in which the sequencing, pacing, and physical object of the book carry as much meaning as any individual photograph. ZZYZX's PhotoBook of the Year award at Paris Photo–Aperture in 2016 confirmed his position as one of the leading figures of that tradition working today.
His influence is felt particularly among younger photographers drawn to the territory between documentary and fiction — work that uses the formal tools of documentary photography (real places, real people, unstaged moments) while resisting documentary photography's traditional claims to objective truth or comprehensive social explanation. His statement that this space "sometimes feels like Surrealism" to him is a useful way of understanding a broader shift in contemporary art photography away from straightforward reportage and toward more ambiguous, constructed forms of truth-telling.
His academic position at RIT, and his teaching history at Harvard, Cornell, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, have given him direct influence over a significant number of photographers working today. His own working method — patient, intuitive, sustained over very long timeframes, committed to the physical printed book and the physical printed photograph — represents a model of practice that stands in deliberate contrast to the speed and immediacy of social-media-driven photography.
His full membership in Magnum Photos places his work within the agency's broader and increasingly diverse range of practices, extending well beyond the photojournalistic tradition the agency was founded upon into the territory of contemporary art photography and the photobook.
Books by Gregory Halpern
Harvard Works Because We Do (2004, Quantuck Lane Press) — His early documentary project photographing the service workers of Harvard University, made while he was a student there. A direct, socially engaged early work that established his interest in labour, class, and institutional power.
A (2011, J&L Books) — Photographed in the American Rust Belt between 2008 and 2011, exploring post-industrial decline and the lives of the communities affected by it.
East of the Sun, West of the Moon (2014) — A collaborative project made with his wife, photographer Ahndraya Parlato.
ZZYZX (2016, MACK) — His defining work and winner of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year award. Five years photographing a semi-fictional journey through California from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Ocean.
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| see it on Amazon |
Omaha Sketchbook (2019, expanded edition, MACK) — Fifteen years of photographs made in Omaha, Nebraska — a meditation on the American heartland, masculinity, and the mechanics of power and inadequacy.
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| see it on Amazon |
Let the Sun Beheaded Be (2020, MACK) — Made over several months in the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, extending his practice beyond the continental United States for the first time.
King, Queen, Knave (2024, MACK) — Twenty years photographing his home city of Buffalo, New York, returning to the Rust Belt themes of his earlier work with the accumulated depth of two decades of observation.
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| see it on Amazon |
Conclusion
Gregory Halpern photographs primarily on 6×7 medium format — using both the Mamiya 7 rangefinder and the Pentax 67 reflex system — supplemented by a 4×5 large format camera, all loaded with colour negative film. He prints his own work as optically enlarged chromogenic prints, maintaining a hands-on, analogue relationship with his images from capture through to the final physical object.
His kit reflects a working philosophy in which format and process are chosen for the specific quality of attention and depth of field they offer, not for exhibition scale or technical convenience — entirely consistent with a practice built around years-long projects, intuitive shooting, and the patient, physical work of building a photobook one contact print at a time.
"I tend to photograph intuitively, photographing what I'm attracted to."