British Journal of Photography: You were born in Buffalo, New York, and much of your work explores the idea of Americanness. What interests you about America — why do you keep returning to it?
Gregory Halpern: I am not particularly patriotic, although I’m not necessarily interested in making an over-simplified critique either; it could be tempting to be judgmental in America while exploring these topics.
Some of it might be to do with the fact that I feel like an outsider here, not just in America, but in the Midwest.
My Grandfather was an illegal immigrant. He fled Hungary just before the Second World War, and, because of anti-Semitic immigration laws, he snuck into this country illegally, hidden in the bottom of a boat. Almost all of his family were killed in the Holocaust. When I was a kid, my Dad would ritualistically ask my Grandfather to tell the story of fleeing Europe and sneaking into the US.
I never used to speak about this, but it is so deeply embedded in who I am, and in how, as a child, my brain was formed to see the world, to see myself, to feel both pride, pain, and some degree of shame in relation to this history. This origin story is all connected to my understanding of my own masculinity, of America, and how I do or do not fit in here.
BJP: How did you want to portray the men and boys depicted in your work, do you want viewers to perceive them in a certain way?
GH: To me, the most respectful and interesting thing a photographer can do is simply observe and honour a person’s complexities and contradictions.
BJP: Omaha Sketchbook spans 15 years but there is a timelessness and fluidity to the images. What was your experience of working on a project for this length of time; how did you achieve such visual cohesiveness?
GH: It’s funny but I sort of lost interest in the place during the Obama years. My interest increased again when Trump was elected, which also coincided with me becoming a father of two daughters. And so, in some ways, the place simply provided a way for me to explore things I was grappling with.
My own photographic interests also shifted over the years, and, in a way, that provided a challenge because I became increasingly interested in the line between fiction and nonfiction in photography. The project began in a style that was more straight, and, at times, it was hard to force myself to fall back into that more innocent approach.