Did you have a preconceived notion of how the project would emerge? Did the final work reflect this, or diverge, and, if so, how?
I don’t like to have a preconceived vision of a final project. I might have a vague outline of the key subjects I want, and how the colours might look, or how the light might feel. The biggest challenge for me was the language barrier, and my anxiety as an interloper compounded this, as did my questions about how, and if, I could do this work justice as a white man and an outsider. This made the inherently awkward practice of photographing strangers all the more awkward.
There is a troubling relationship between photography and hunting, or “trophy-keeping”, as photographer Sim Chi Yin once put it, and that’s in your mind all the time. This was the first time I made a body of work outside the US, and something I didn’t anticipate was how self-conscious I would be, at times, making pictures.
On bad days, there was a voice in my head telling me I was just another colonialist, extracting images from Guadeloupe for my benefit. On good days, the voice told me it was important for me, and other white people, to be thinking about this history and to be engaging with it visually, and that I would find a way to do it with sensitivity and respect.
Most days were somewhere in the middle. With all projects, I tend to struggle with a deep self-criticality, but, with this project, there were a lot of days I simply spiralled downward about the inevitable failure of the work, given my identity in relation to the subject.
An extended version of this interview will be published in the upcoming print edition of British Journal of Photography.
The exhibition Soleil cou coupé, (Let the Sun Beheaded Be), curated by Clément Chéroux in collaboration with Agnès Sire, is on show from 08 September to 18 October 2020 at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, and will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, California, in 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by Halpern’s monograph of the same name, published by Aperture. The project was made possible by Immersion: a French-American Photography Commission launched in 2014 by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.