Omaha, Nebraska, is the fixed point of Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook, but the book’s attention falls less on the city’s skyline than on the men and boys who pass through it. The photographs were made over fifteen years, and that long accumulation shows in the way the sequence reads: not as a report but as a gradual, unsettled understanding of a place and the people in it.

The book’s structure comes out of Halpern’s working method. Spreads are loosely collaged to reproduce the construction-paper sketchbooks in which the project took shape, and the pages deliberately court dissonance — an image that sits awkwardly beside its neighbour, a harmony that arrives unasked. Attraction and repulsion are held in the same frame, a doubleness the publisher names outright.

Beneath the formal play sits a subject with weight: American masculinity, and the mechanics of aggression, inadequacy and power as they are learned and performed. Halpern’s approach is lyrical and equivocal rather than declarative; he does not resolve what he sees, and the pictures keep their open tension.

This second edition is not a simple reissue. Halpern has altered the first iteration with a new cover and thirty-five previously unseen photographs, returning to his original idea of the project as a sketchbook he will revise periodically. For collectors, that revision is the point: the volume represents one state of an ongoing work, and its physical form — paperback with linen spine, 144 pages, 23 by 29 centimetres — suits the provisional, work-in-progress character the photographs claim for themselves.