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. A text by curator and editor Clément Chéroux grapples with the island's history in relation to the French Revolution, Surrealism, and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, 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 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.
Let the Sun Beheaded Be is the most recent commission by Fondation d'entreprise Hermès, 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 Chéroux, will open at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, in September 2020; and at SFMOMA in spring 2021.
