ZZYZX

In ZZYZX, American photographer Gregory Halpern presents California as a place that resists easy interpretation. Published by MACK in 2016, the photobook brings together images made over five years in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. Moving between desert landscapes, city streets, portraits and unexpected encounters, Halpern creates a visual portrait of a region shaped by ambition, beauty and uncertainty.

California has long been associated with opportunity and the pursuit of a better life. Halpern looks beyond this familiar image, photographing a place where the promise of prosperity exists alongside hardship and decline. Rather than presenting the state as either a paradise or a place in crisis, he brings its different realities together, allowing the contradictions to remain unresolved.

The photographs follow a loose geographical route, beginning in the desert east of Los Angeles, moving west through the city and ending at the Pacific Ocean. This progression connects the landscape to the history of American expansion, when settlers moved westward in search of land, opportunity and a new beginning. Reaching the Pacific marked the fulfilment of what became known as the country's doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Halpern revisits this westward movement through the contemporary experience of Los Angeles, a city that continues to attract people hoping to find success or reinvent themselves. The journey towards the coast becomes both a physical route and a reflection on the American dream: the desire to reach somewhere better, and the possibility that the destination may not deliver what was promised.

Although the people, places and animals in ZZYZX are real, Halpern's approach goes beyond straightforward documentary photography. The book's meaning develops through the selection and sequence of images, which bring together scenes that might otherwise have little connection. A portrait placed beside a landscape, for example, can create an unexpected association without explaining exactly what links them.

Halpern has described wanting his documentary work to become something more, allowing fiction and fantasy to enter the way he depicts the world. The resulting images feel grounded in reality but often carry an enigmatic, almost surreal quality. Influenced in part by magic realism and literature, he constructs a visual narrative that leaves room for viewers to form their own interpretations.

Light plays an important role in the photographs. Halpern has spoken about the hazy quality of Los Angeles sunlight, partly caused by pollution. The atmosphere is visually compelling, yet its beauty is inseparable from the environmental conditions that produce it. This tension between appearance and reality runs throughout the book.

The surrounding landscape can appear vast and desolate, while the city is marked by dense development and heavy traffic. Images of fires and their aftermath point to the fragility of California's natural environment, where the threat of fire and a lack of water are persistent concerns. Through his attention to composition and light, Halpern photographs these places without reducing them to illustrations of environmental damage.

Many of the book's portraits come from chance encounters on the streets of Los Angeles. Halpern photographs people whose gestures, clothing or surroundings catch his attention, often without knowing much about their lives. A street performer wearing a plastic crown or a couple pulling their belongings along the pavement becomes the subject of an image that suggests a story without fully revealing it.

Halpern avoids turning people living on the margins into simple symbols of hardship. Instead, he allows their individuality and the ambiguity of each encounter to remain visible. The portraits are attentive without claiming to explain their subjects, inviting viewers to look closely while acknowledging how little can be known about another person's life from a single photograph.

The title ZZYZX comes from a settlement in California's Mojave Desert, originally called Soda Springs before being renamed in 1944 by mineral water entrepreneur Curtis Howe Springer. Its unusual name reflects the book's interest in places that sit between the familiar and the strange. The project received the Photobook of the Year award at the 2016 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards and remains one of Halpern's best-known works. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1977, he studied history and literature at Harvard University before completing an MFA at California College of the Arts. He later received a Guggenheim Fellowship and became a member of Magnum Photos. In ZZYZX, his literary interests and photographic practice come together in a portrait of California that is as much about how a place is imagined as how it is seen.