Let The Sun Beheaded Be - Chéroux Clément

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Résumé :
In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated colonial history. Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling new work, an extension of his characteristic attention to the way details of a landscape, and the people who inhabit it, often reveal undercurrents of local histories and experiences. A text by curator and editor Cl?ment Ch?roux grapples with the island's history in relation to the French Revolution, Surrealism, and the Martinican poet Aim? C?saire, whose writing inspired the title of the book and many of the images inside; a conversation between Halpern and photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa considers Halpern's process and personal history, as well as the politics of representation. Let the Sun Beheaded Be is a thoughtful and visually striking depiction of place-shaped by the forces of natural and human history-and an engagement with the complexities of photographing as an interloper in a foreign land.

Let the Sun Beheaded Be is the most recent commission by Fondation d'entreprise Herm?s, working in alliance with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission. An exhibition of Halpern's work, curated by Ch?roux, will open at SFMOMA on May 30, 2020; and at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, in fall 2020.

Biographie:
Gregory Halpern (born in Buffalo, New York, 1977) received a BA in history and literature from Harvard University, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published six books of his work: Harvard Works Because We Do (2003), A (2011), East of the Sun, West of the Moon (in collaboration with Ahndraya Parlato, 2014), ZZYZX (2016), Confederate Moons (2018), and Omaha Sketchbook (2019). He is coeditor of The Photographer's Playbook (with Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2014) and teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology, New York.

Cl?ment Ch?roux is senior curator in the department of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Previously, he served as chief curator of photography at the Mus?e National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and former editor of the website The Great Leap Sideways. His publication One Wall a Web (2018) won the 2018 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award.