Gregory Halpern

In Let the Sun Beheaded Be, photographer Gregory Halpern focuses on the French Caribbean archipelago of Guadeloupe, a French overseas region with a complicated and violent colonial history.

Renowned for his photographic meditations on place, Halpern presents a compelling portrait of Guadeloupe and its inhabits, focusing on local histories and experiences. Let the Sun Beheaded Be commingles life and death, nature and culture, and beauty and decay in enigmatic color images of the archipelago’s residents and lush landscape, as well as monuments related to the brutality of its past. The project is part of Immersion, a program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, in partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

About the Photographer

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.

About the Contributors

Clément Chéroux 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 Musée 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.