Gregory Halpern is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos. He teaches photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The pictures in the series ZZYZX, a book of photographs Halpern published in 2016, begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific – the images take the viewer on a somewhat surreal journey through the city. The people, places, and animals included in the series ZZYZX are kind of turned into a work of fiction, with a structure, sequence, and edit which, like Los Angeles itself, teeters on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own oddly shaped mass. ‘The early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies – sprawl, spaghetti junctions, and skid row—but the place is not so easily distilled or visualized, either as a cliched paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, the psychedelic, the self-destructive. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory, but to greater extremes. Cultures and histories coexist, the beautiful sits next to the ugly, the redemptive next to the despairing, and all under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh,’ says Gregory Halpern about this project.  

Why we believe in this NFT: This photographic work uses light and depth of field in a very sophisticated way to render space in a beautiful manner.  

We warmly welcome Gregory Halpern to JennyDAO |  

Thanks to Fellowship Trust and Alejandro Cartagena  

NFT: https://opensea.io/assets/0x11665f3fdefff375d32ee7fefe96af56ca0cc502/13  

Original collection https://opensea.io/collection/zzyzx-by-gregory-halpern

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