Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern East of the Sun, West of the Moon - High Falls
For three years, the photographers Ahndraya Parlato and Gregory Halpern took pictures four times a year—on the Solstices and Equinoxes. The couple gave themselves a simple prompt: to make pictures inspired by these transitional moments. The result was a series called East of the Sun, West of the Moon.
Their title is borrowed from a Norwegian folk tale, which plays on the impossibility of using continually-shifting landmarks as navigational guides. As such, Parlato and Halpern embraced the disorientation of inhabiting elusive or impossible places. Certain themes, such as transition and renewal, lightness and darkness, birth and death, and the passage of time in general, appear in this series, as in the individual practices of both photographers.
Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern East of the Sun, West of the Moon - Candle
Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern
Ahndraya Parlato (b.1979, Kailua, Hawaii) currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Parlato has published three books of photographs and has also contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato is the recipient of a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant.
Gregory Halpern (b. 1977, Buffalo, USA) currently teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Halpern has published seven books of photographs. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is an Associate Member of Magnum Photos.
Location: Station
Ahndraya Parlato & Gregory Halpern East of the Sun, West of the Moon - Puppy Pitbull