ZZYZX by Gregory Halpern Large format hardback Please note there are unsigned copies of the first and second printing in new condition The copy that is signed by Halpern to title page is a first edition and is in fine condition. Some very slight toning to extremities of pages. Binding firm. About ZZYZX Early settlers dubbed California The Golden State, and The Land of Milk and Honey. Today there are the obvious ironies. LA is not so easily visualised, either as a clichéd paradise or as its demise. There’s a strange kind of harmony when it’s all seen together—the sublime, and the psychedelic. Like all places, it’s unpredictable and contradictory. Cultures and histories coexist, beauty coexists with the ugly. As well as the redemptive next to the despairing. All under a strange and singular light, as transcendent as it is harsh. The pictures in this book begin in the desert east of Los Angeles and move west through the city, ending at the Pacific. This general westward movement alludes to a thirst for water, which was born in the East and which hungrily drove itself West until reaching the Pacific. The people, places, and animals in the book did exist before Halpern’s camera. Halpern has sewn these photographs into a work of fiction, sequence and edit which, teeters on the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own strangely-shaped mass.
