In *King, Queen, Knave*, Gregory Halpern returns to Buffalo, New York, the city where he grew up, with a photographic project shaped over more than two decades. Published by MACK in 2024, the book gathers an idiosyncratic portrait of a place that resists easy definition. Rather than repeat familiar accounts of post-industrial decline, Halpern attends to Buffalo’s contradictions, allowing the city to appear at once recognisable and strange, grounded in social reality yet touched by surrealism.

The photographs are arranged as a carefully unfolding sequence. Distinct, unpredictable figures emerge among solitary buildings, snowdrifts, and sun-bleached scenes drawn from everyday life. Seasonal detail gives the work a particular sense of place, while the images also hold onto the singular intensity of a passing moment. This tension—between a historical view of the city and the immediate radiance of individual encounters—gives the book its unusual temporal quality.

Halpern’s approach is neither documentary explanation nor detached formal study. It is a sustained act of looking at a birthplace whose complexities cannot be reduced to a single narrative. Ideas of reversal and ascension run through the work, alongside the uneasy coexistence of beauty and ugliness, redemption and despair. Buffalo becomes both subject and stage, and contemporary America enters the frame through the pressures and contradictions concentrated there.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a mature, long-form engagement with one location, in which sequencing is central to meaning. Its 112 pages present not an inventory of Buffalo but a deliberately enigmatic constellation of images, inviting repeated readings. The first edition is issued as a hardcover by MACK, making this 2024 monograph a substantial record of Halpern’s extended return to familiar ground.