Omaha Sketchbook by Gregory Halpern

Halpern has significantly altered the first iteration of the book with a new cover and thirty-five previously unseen photographs, breathing life into his original notion that this project is a working sketchbook he will return to and revise periodically.

Throughout his career, Gregory Halpern has engaged in a restless, searching investigation of Americanness—an elusive, shape-shifting idea that defies easy definition. His work lingers in places where history and myth blur, where the landscape itself seems to hold the weight of past aspirations and present tensions. Traveling through the American heartland—a contested and often romanticized terrain—Halpern’s images trace the uneasy intersections of power, masculinity, and belonging.

His long-term engagement with Omaha, Nebraska, unfolds as a meditation on a country at once familiar and unknowable, its identity fractured yet insistent. In collaged sequences that mirror the fluidity of memory and perception, his images resist linear narratives, instead embracing contradiction—tenderness and brutality, expansion and emptiness, promise and failure. Adolescents on the threshold of something undefined, landscapes thick with absence, a domestic world edged with unease: Halpern’s photographs invite us to look at America in a way that is at once deeply personal and undeniably collective.

What makes Omaha Sketchbook particularly resonant today is the way it reflects the undercurrents of anxiety, aggression, and disillusionment that continue to shape the U.S. political landscape. The book captures a nation grappling with itself, where traditional ideals of masculinity, power, and identity are being fiercely contested. The rural and midwestern landscapes Halpern photographs have long been considered the heart of “real America,” yet his images complicate this notion, showing a place neither monolithic nor stable, but raw, restless, and unresolved.

In an era marked by polarization, Halpern’s approach resists easy binaries. His America is not one of simplistic nostalgia or outright critique, but of friction and fluidity. His images neither condemn nor celebrate, instead offering an invitation to look more closely—at the people, the land, the quiet gestures that carry the weight of history. By allowing contradiction to exist within a single frame, Halpern pushes us to reconsider what we think we know about this country, who belongs to it, and how its identity continues to evolve.

Ultimately, Omaha Sketchbook is less a statement than a question, an ongoing inquiry into the American psyche. It offers no singular truth, no clear resolution, but rather a vision of a country in flux—its edges fraying, its center shifting, its future uncertain. At a time when national identity feels more contested than ever, Halpern’s work serves as both a mirror and a provocation, asking us to sit with discomfort, to acknowledge complexity, and to see America as it is: fractured, plural, and still unfinished.